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MCC Daily Tribune Archive

The Attendance Process: A five-part series entitled We Don't Understand Attendance So Why Should You?


PART ONE: The Meaning of Absent.

Several years ago, when I still had the misfortune of being in charge of the attendance project, (Ginger Toth has since taken over, bless her) I was asked by a SUNY school to come talk to them about how MCC handled the state attendance requirements. I told them that I would be glad to do it if I could present it as stand up comedy because there was no way I could possibly present it in any other way. They declined.

While there is nothing that says we must take attendance, we are required to keep track of and report a student's last date of attendance for financial aid and we are required to deliver census data minus the inflated figures of registrants who never showed up for class. We are supposed to do this on a timely basis and only have a 2% error rate. Sounds like taking attendance to me.

But wait. Actually we don't care who is IN class, we care about who is NOT in class. We aren't taking attendance; we are taking non-attendance. If this one concept could be universally understood, there would be a lot fewer errors. We don't care who is in class, we care about who is missing. Think posters nailed to tree trunks. Imagine flyers being taken door to door with the word MISSING splashed across the top. Bottom line: If you have people on your class list who qualify to appear on a milk carton, these are the people we want to know about.

Who cares if someone missed a few classes? Who cares if people drift in and out from one week to the next? Who cares if a student is doing your homework from a hospital bed? You do. We don't.

Only mark a student absent if they are truly missing, if they never appeared or only appeared once or twice and then never again, or if they have given a strong indication that they have no intention of taking your class even though they registered for it. The sporadic, the drifters, the hospitalized should remain marked as present.

The second installment of the attendance series will be: Making fun of people who make mistakes on the attendance forms and the MAT screen.


Deborah Benjamin
Registration and Records
02/10/2004