Background :-
- Many colleges of India made 75% attendance per subject in every semester compulsory for students as a criteria for eligibility to appear for exams.
- The decision was also backed by Bombay High Court in 2002 in a case, where 46 students were not allowed to appear for exams due to poor attendance.
In Favor :-
- Good attendance is needed to develop a strong sense of community in a classroom and to encourage a healthy sense of class participation.
- Students learn self-discipline due to mandatory attendance, which will help them in their professional as well as personal life.
- Compulsory attendance will improve overall performance of the students, and will guarantee their satisfactory results and will also encourage socialization.
- Getting education is a not cheap endeavor, so it’s a waste of money to skip classes and not learning the things that they can.
- Enforcing mandatory attendance could actually be treating students as adults. Once students get a job, they would be allowed only a certain amount of vacations and absences. So, this is the way to prepare students for ‘real world’ and reinforce the sense of responsibility.
- To make sure they get to class while meeting all their other obligations, students will have to perfect time management skills.
- In the process of learning how to balance all their responsibilities, students could become better at multi-tasking as well.
- Many colleges excuse absences when students attend and participate in academic events, go on educational tours or similar. This way students could still be able to do extra-curricular activities.
Against :-
- As college students and as adults, students should have the right to prioritize their time based on their needs.
- Attending classes should be a choice, not an obligation.
- If Students are mature enough to elect the country’s government, surely they can decide what lectures to attend and what lectures to bunk.
- Relaxation on attendance front would give students opportunity to attend workshops, internships, and extracurricular activities. This would give chance to develop their life skills.
- Students enjoys lectures by capable teachers but some teachers themselves doesn’t understand the subject and gives the same examples that are given in books. They doesn’t offer anything new to learn. This is unfair to make them sit through hours of mind-numbing monotones while they could be more productive.
- Making attendance compulsory could be taken as refusal to recognize students as intelligent adults capable of making their own decisions.
- Universities should have some regulation, but student should be primarily responsible for their own education and attendance policies must reflect the same.
- Though some students appear to fake the reasons to have excuse from class, most of them have genuine reasons. Many students are earning with learning to sustain their studies expenses. Some are learning while fighting with deadly and rare diseases.
- Students understand the value of the education and knowledge, and they should be trusted over it.
Conclusion :-
Every coin has two sides. While implementing strict rules regarding attendance could be a way to ensure that students attend the classes and are being evaluated on a regular basis, this could also become troublesome for students. Some students, who have major responsibilities along with education faces most inconvenience.
So implementation of attendance should have relaxations within it for such situations where students are unable to attend the classes regularly due to genuine reasons. Students should have the right to choose which lecture they want to attend and which is not. So, need of an hour is to achieve a balance between the two.
Afterwords :- Do you agree with the present attendance policies? What are your thoughts on this topic? Feel free to express your opinion in the comment section below.
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