Last year, a classmate of mine came in with a mask. My professor, a staunch advocate for the one-strike attendance policy, asked the student: “Do you have COVID?” “I don’t know,” the student said, “but I can’t miss this class.”
Teachers that use strict single-strike attendance policies hold students’ grades hostage at the expense of their health. These policies rarely bolster meaningful student engagement. Instead, they compromise student health and act as an unnecessary stressor.
One-strike attendance policies present students with a choice: keep your peers healthy and take the GPA hit or show up to class and put everyone at risk. This false dilemma piles stress and anxiety on students already suffering from sickness, which ultimately prolongs it.
For students with chronic illnesses and compromised immune systems, excessive attendance policies represent a real threat to their health. Attending class when sick exposes vulnerable students to illnesses that affect them disproportionately, and the implication that sickness can be controlled is inherently ableist.
Accommodation exists for students that require multiple absences, but the superfluous hurdles they have to jump through every time they get sick detracts from any time spent recuperating and resting. The roadblocks to healing also make students feel anxious or guilty about getting sick.
In my experience, teachers that institute scorched-earth attendance policies spend most of their time afterward excusing absences. If every instance is an exception to the rule, why have the rule at all?
Even professors struggle to adhere to their own policies. I can think of multiple professors who, by their standards, would be failing their own classes.
The quality of work produced by a student should dictate their grade, not their attendance. In-class participation and assignments are important, but they should never come at the expense of mental or physical health.
Teachers and students enter an agreement at the beginning of every semester: teachers promise to teach course material, and students promise to engage with course material. It can be incredibly frustrating for teachers to pour time and effort into their courses only to have students fail to show up.
However, teachers can structure their courses to mitigate the effects of rampant absenteeism. In-class participation and in-class assignments are sufficient motivation for students to come to class. But students that miss in-person assignments should be given reasonable time to make them up.
One-strike attendance policies don’t motivate students who don’t care about engaging with course content because the choice lies with the student either way. Strict attendance policies only affect students who do show up and who want to do well.
People get sick, things come up. One-strike attendance policies put a ridiculous limit on what is ultimately pure chance.
If you are sick, it is your duty to your peers to contain that sickness. In other words: stay home!
Columbine Hall, home of the College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences. Photo by Logan Cole.