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MCC Daily Tribune Archive

Phantom Students: Disinterested Scholars or Super Heroes?


There is a shroud of mystery hanging over the names on your class list of students you have never seen. How did they get on your list? Why have they never come? What are they doing instead of attending your class? Who are these people?

I’ve been attempting to procure a grant that would enable me to look into this enigma and expose it to the world. So far I have been unsuccessful. No one wants to pay me for anything now that they have found out I sit and stare out my window all day and write drivel. Apparently that is NOT considered a real job. Someone tell that to all the syndicated columnists. Staring and writing IS a real profession!

Being a naturally curious person I decided to set out and pursue the mystery student phenomenon on my own. I’ve discovered that these phantom students are on your class list because they actually registered for your course. And paid. As to why they never showed up, assuming it has nothing to do with you personally, and I’m not completely willing to concede that, there are several possible reasons.

1) They forgot they registered for the course. If this is the case, you probably didn’t miss out on a real whiz kid.

2) They changed their mind and assumed you would withdraw them. We all know what they say about assume. It applies here.
3) They think they are attending the course they registered for but are actually attending another section of the same course. See comment #1 above.
4) They heard it was an easy A and didn’t realize that they actually had to do something, like show up, to obtain this easy A. See comment #1 above again!

Now things get really interesting when I set out to discover what they are doing instead of attending your class and who these people really are. After months of research I haven’t learned anything and have had to come to the obvious conclusion. If reasons 1-4 above do not apply you can safely assume your phantom student is a genuine Super Hero. He/She needs to appear on your class list as a cover for his/her actual activities during your class time, which would be saving the world. We should be proud they chose MCC.

Here are a couple more Q and A’s that I was able to answer during the course of my extensive, and inadequately financed, research into the phantom student phenomena.

Q: I indicated during the attendance period that a student was no longer attending my class. He is still on my class list. Shouldn’t he have been dropped? What should I do with him? He’s never even been here.
A: While the majority of students who are tagged as ‘never attended’ in the attendance collection period are dropped from the course, many are not. Reporting a student as never attending does not guarantee he will be dropped; lack of attendance is just one of many other factors, most of them financial, that are considered before the student is or isn’t dropped. The bottom line is that if a student is still appearing on your class roster he will need to be graded. If you have never seen him and don’t want to give him an “F”, you need to withdraw him by 4/18/09.

Q: I have a student who asked me to withdraw him. Am I obligated to do this?
A: No. Withdrawal is a student’s responsibility. I do think you are obligated to make it clear to him that you will not withdraw him though. We always have a lot of students who miss the withdrawal deadline then claim they thought their instructor withdrew them. If you are not going to withdraw a student, please be sure he understands that. I’d make a note of that in my grade book so when he came in complaining of an “F” I could remind him of that conversation.

The exception, for me, would be if a student called me from the hospital or had other extenuating circumstances that made it impossible for him to withdraw himself. Now that students can withdraw online, this should be less of an issue. No one needs to come to the Registrar’s Office to withdraw anymore. Soon we will be telepathically withdrawing people. It’s in our Five Year Plan. Really.

Aspice, officio fungeris sine spe honoris amplioris

Deborah Benjamin
Registration and Records
04/07/2009