Creating an Attendance Policy for Higher Education Classrooms

If you teach college students, you have a unique challenge ahead of you: creating attendance policies. When you teach younger students, they have no choice but to follow every rule you lay out or they risk detention, getting in trouble with their parents, etc. When you teach college students, you work with young adults. These young adults, for the first time in their lives, have a lot of leeway to live life on their own terms. This situation is both a blessing and a curse.

To make the attendance policy fair to the students and to keep it from causing you headaches, consider the following points.

Consider where your students are at in their lives. You are teaching young adults and they will not respond well to you if they feel like you're treating them like a child.

Make sure the policy is strict enough. The attendance policy needs to be strict so they don't feel like they just get a free pass. However, it should not be so strict that it engenders lies about Grandma dying or makes students feel like they can't take sick days when they have the flu. They are young adults. Young adults need to be responsible for themselves, not to have you hold their hands.

Include EVERYTHING. Make sure that EVERYTHING is spelled out clearly in the policy (with no room for interpretation) if you want it to hold its weight. If you have written anything ambiguously or you forget to mention something, you will no doubt get one or two students who try to push their luck. If you don't say it in the "contract" you cannot expect to be able to enforce it in the real world. "Everything" includes the number of absences you will allow, what counts as "excused" versus "unexcused" absences, whether or not you consider tardiness to count as an absence, etc.

Tailor your attendance policy to meet your needs. Decide whether you want the attendance policy to be punitive or rewarding. Some attendance policies focus on the number of absences students are allowed before you, the teacher, start taking away points or percentages from their grades. Conversely, some teachers choose to reward their students for attending class. For example, someone with perfect or near perfect attendance may be given five bonus points on an assignment or paper.

I have not seen the rewarding-type of attendance policy used very often, and in fact, it is not the way I choose to do it. Even though college students are young adults and should be appreciated for managing their time efficiently, I do not find it necessary or appropriate to reward them for getting their butts to class.

Go through the attendance policy in class. Instead of just handing your students the attendance policy and expecting them to understand it fully, take the time at the beginning of the semester to walk through the policy with all students. Encourage them to ask questions. Encourage them to voice their concerns if they think elements of the policy are unfair. This read-through provides an excellent opportunity for you to share why you have certain expectations of them.

Have your students sign off on the contract. A great way to make sure your students understand the policy (and to cover your butt) is to have your students sign a simple contract stating that they understand all requirements spelled out in the attendance policy and that they will ask you for clarifications if they are ever confused. This may sound unnecessary, but it does provide you with a shield. If the students sign off on the contract in the first week, they cannot come to you in the last week of the semester complaining that they didn't understand your unfair rules.

Of course, there are other points to consider when you create an attendance policy. These are just a few of the strategies that I have used successful in the classroom.