Wednesday, December 28, 2011

U-M attendance policy may pose challenge to students attending Sugar Bowl

From AnnArbor.com 

9: I hired a sophomore to sit in my Bio class
the first day.

8: Well played!
Heading to New Orleans for Tuesday's Sugar Bowl? Well, if you're a University of Michigan student missing the first day of classes on Wednesday — the day after the game — you may want to check the attendance policy. Some U-M departments and professors are stressing that students are not exempt from classes just because of the bowl game, according to a Michigan Daily report.

In fact, many department attendance policies mandate that students be in class at least the first few meetings in order to be granted admission. “Students planning to miss class on January 4 are not to be automatically excused from class attendance,” LSA Dean Terrence McDonald wrote in an email to students. “As always units and instructors have the authority to interpret and apply these general College policies.”

The official LSA policy states professors can give away class spots if students don’t attend the first session of a biology, chemistry or physical laboratory, according to the report. Although some professors said they plan to excuse students who have previously contacted them about their impending absence, others have expressed that the no exemption policy is needed to keep admission fair to students on class waitlists.

5 comments:

  1. Being one of those profs who could not possibly give less of a fuck about sports, I would hope that affected profs will interpret the rules as they wish, and that their institution will back them.

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  2. Addendum

    But their institution probably won't back them.

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  3. Athletics were incredibly important to me in school. I might not have gone to college without them; I definitely would not have stayed in college without them.

    My student athletes (at a regional state uni) are among my best students. Their coaches are faculty members like us, and instill in them a kind of order and discipline the "regular" college student sometimes doesn't have.

    Of course that sort of student-athlete is NOT what we're talking about at the very highest level of these things (the Michigans, the USCs, etc.)

    But I think it's fair to assess athletics in college in a variety of ways depending on how big programs are and how much power they have "over" academics. At my school, there's NO such power, so it works beautifully.

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  4. I'm sure this will be built up as a conflict between faculty and students but its the Michigan players' fault. If they had played better, they'd be losing the following Monday against LSU rather than losing to Virginia Tech.

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  5. I taught in the state system before moving to this SLAC six years ago. We had a routine policy that if students were not in class on Day 1, we could give away their seats to those who had shown up requesting to be added... students griped, but since it was general campus policy, it worked well for us. It also meant we didn't have students on our rosters for three weeks who never bothered to show.

    ReplyDelete

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