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MCC Daily Tribune Archive

Attendance Process Part Five: The Summation


PART FIVE: Attendance reporting: Telling you what I already told you: The summation

While I could go on forever making fun of our attendance process, all good things must come to an end and one must look in other directions for people and things to ridicule. Grading is a lot of fun and fraught with comedy. We'll do that series in April.

If one could plough through 4 articles of verbiage, what should one come away with? (See, you could have saved four days of reading and just read this article. Gotcha!)

The Five Commandments of Attendance

Thou Shall Turn in your Attendance Data
If you are solicited for attendance information, your class is an important part of the foundation of our attendance reporting. Everyone who is solicited for attendance information needs to turn in his or her attendance data. Our error rate starts building with each class that is not reported. One person may not make a difference in an election but he does in attendance reporting. Pretend that your attendance roster is the one that will keep Michael Jackson out of the White House.

Thou Shall Turn in your Attendance Data On Time
If your attendance information is turned in late, students are not retroactively dropped. If you miss the date, you are still providing some useful information but basically the damage has already been done to our error rate. It's like voting the day after the polls close.

Thou Shall be Accurate: Report only the truly missing as absent.
When hundreds of corrections need to be made after the attendance drop, this is not only a lot of extra work for you and me, this is a lot of frustration, anger and heartbreak for the students who were dropped in error. There are repercussions from being dropped that affect more than a class list-the student's tuition, his TAP, his financial aid and his disposition are also affected.

Thou Shall Read the Directions and Fill Out the Form Correctly.
We don't want to add you to the list of people we point our fingers at and laugh...but we will if you give us cause.

Thou Shall Remember This is A Scanner Form and It Must Be Scanned.
Don't get ugly with this form. Take out your frustrations on the cover letter. We don't want that back anyway.

Auxiliary Commandment (found etched on the back of the original Attendance Commandments tablet): It's ok to make fun of the whole process. SUNY mandates that we report accurate enrollment figures and that we don't disburse financial aid to people who are not actually attending the college. While this requirement makes sense, complying with the requirement is a three-ring circus. Attendance Committee Meetings are some of the funniest around. Attendance gatherers are aware of the humor involved in the process. While our destination is noble and important, we all appreciate how silly the journey is. Don't hesitate to laugh with us.

(Earlier articles in this series are available in the Daily Tribune archive. See the link at the bottom of the right hand column.)

Deborah Benjamin
Registration and Records
02/16/2004