Grading attendance hurts students

Excused absence policies don't make it better

It was my first semester teaching at a community college, and I was proctoring the first exam. About 20 minutes in, sitting in front of the quiet classroom, I got an email. It was from Diana (pseudonym), a student enrolled in the course who was absent that day and thus missing the exam.  It read something like this:

Hey Dr. Dyer I’m in the parking lot with my daughter my mom said she’d meet me here to take care of her but she’s not here yet so I’m just waiting I don’t want to miss the exam but I don’t know what else to do

I couldn’t invite Diana to bring her kid into the classroom¹, though I wished I could. Diana ended up coming into class about 30 or 40 minutes late. She did her best to complete the exam in the time remaining, but she didn’t do well; her tardiness cost her! And I didn’t even have a late or no-show policy that would have docked points simply because she was late.

For a secret project² I’m working on, I recently reviewed a couple dozen General Biology syllabi from wide-ranging institutions. Several courses included attendance in the grade, but one was particularly striking. In this 2022 community college syllabus, 20% of the total course grade is based on attendance, which is determined like this:

0 lateness, 0 absence: 100%

1-2 absences: 80%

3-4 absences: 50%

5 absences or more: 0%

2 latenesses = 1 absence

If I’m reading this policy correctly, missing just one class means a student’s final grade would be reduced by 4% total. Missing three classes would result in a 10% (full letter grade) reduction! Let’s talk about why this is problematic.

Note: in the rest of this post I will only discuss grading for absences, but the same principles apply to grading for tardiness.

Grading for attendance hits students twice

When a student misses a class, they miss the opportunity to learn the content in class. In my experience, many students perform worse on the portion of the assessment related to what they missed. In this way, their grade already takes a hit when they are absent; this is, in parenting lingo, “natural consequences.”

Reducing their grade for the absence means their grade takes a second, additional hit.

Think about it this way – if a student misses a class, makes up what they missed and performs well on the assessment, should their grade really be lower than a student who attended class and performed equally as well on the assessment?

Some students are more likely to miss class than others

Students miss class – have to miss class sometimes – for a variety of reasons. Here is a non-exhaustive list of reasons my community college students have missed class:

• they are sick

• a dependent is sick

• they can’t find care for a young dependent

• they are, or a family member is, in an emergency situation like hospitalization, domestic violence, or a mental health crisis

• they have a doctor’s appointment they can’t move

• car troubles

The students that are more likely to experience these challenges are working students, students with dependents, students that come from unstable home or employment backgrounds, students with disabilities or mental health challenges – in other words, students who already face systemic barriers to success in college! Grading policies that penalize absences disproportionately harm them.

You might think, “but students can get their absences excused!”

I argue that having excused absence policies that require instructors to categorize students’ reasons as valid or invalid does more harm than good.

Why requiring an excuse is problematic

The syllabus I mentioned earlier specifically states:

No make-ups are given except at the discretion of the instructor pending submission of written proof of reason for absence.³

The statement is about missing exams or quizzes, but I’ll be generous and assume it applies to the participation/attendance score as well. Let’s unpack this statement piecemeal:

No make-ups are given except at the discretion of the instructor…

The “discretion of the instructor” will always be liable to bias, including implicit bias. Whether you accept a student’s excuse will be influenced by the way you were raised, the identities of the student and how they compare with your identities as well as privileged identities in society… even the stresses you’ve already dealt with that day (let’s be honest, whether I’ve had a snack recently or not!).

Because I was raised in America and therefore I have racist implicit biases, I know that I’m more likely to dismiss the excuse from a Black or brown student than a from white student. I can intentionally try to counter this bias, but it is an implicit bias, which means I won’t always notice it. This is structural inequity in action.

In response to these arguments, I’ve heard some instructors say, “I just give a pass to anyone to asks.” But this is still problematic, for two reasons:

1) Not all students are equally as likely to ask for an excuse. You may be a truly welcoming and open instructor, but your position of power will always pose a barrier for some students to reach out to ask for special circumstances.

2) Students shouldn’t have to share details of their personal life with you to be successful in your class.

… pending submission of written proof of reason for absence.

It is common to require written proof of a reason for an absence, especially doctor’s notes. But if you teach in the United States, where universal healthcare is not available, your students are not guaranteed access to a doctor! Furthermore, even if they do have health insurance, it can still be costly and time-consuming to see a doctor to get a written note.

Seriously: if a student is sick, they should stay home! One semester, during an in-class exam, one of my students kept getting up and going to the bathroom. When I asked him what was going on, he said he kept needing to vomit (!). I told him to go home. Frankly, I find it horrific that students have been trained so thoroughly not to miss an exam that they will come to class while vomiting.

But even for non-health related emergencies, what does written proof look like? Would you accept a note from a car mechanic? A parent? A neighbor? A friend? Again, we’re back to the problem of biases. There is no fair and equitable way to mete out judgment about which excuses are valid or not.

What to do instead

You want your students to be successful. You know that attending class is important. It’s tempting to use grades to incentivize students attending class on time, but I hope I’ve convinced you that grade-based attendance policies disproportionately harm certain students, and there is no way to equitably counter the harm with “excused absences” policies.

Here are some non-grade-related ways to incentivize attendance:

• make class exciting, fun, community-oriented, and explicitly relevant to the assessments so students have an internal motivation to attend

• show evidence from your own classes that students with better attendance tend to perform better on assessments

• reward students with stickers for good attendance

• mentor individual students, or refer them to administrators in mentoring positions, to help them navigate goal-setting and time management strategies

• contingency plan in advance how to handle students missing important class periods, like exam days, and communicate in advance what will happen if they miss one

• trust students to make, and learn from, their own decisions about how they spend their time

If you do have (or are required to have) a grade-based attendance policy, be sure to build in a no-questions-asked buffer that won’t dock the grade for a certain number of missed classes.

One final note: I didn’t mention grading for “participation,” because that’s its own can of worms, but if you do grade for participation, make sure it doesn’t function as a proxy for attendance.

Not everything you read on the internet was written by a human. For full transparency, here is how I used AI to help me write this post:

I conceptualized, outlined, and drafted the entire post. I copy-pasted my draft into Claude and asked it to help me reduce repetitive sections and tighten up the language to clarify my arguments. I made some of the edits it suggested, but not all!⁴

1. My institution has a strict no-kids-in-classrooms policy

2. I hope to announce it soon!

3. Actually, it states, in all caps “NO MAKE-UPS ARE GIVEN EXCEPT AT THE DISCRETION OF THE INSTRUCTOR PENDING SUBMISSION OF WRITTEN PROOF OF REASON FOR ABSENCE.” I don’t know about you, but I read this as the instructor yelling. Yikes.

4. Claude told me to “Remove the exclamation points to maintain a more professional tone.” My exclamation marks reflect my style of thinking! and writing! and speaking! So I kept them in.