Mandatory attendance and its shortcomings

Taufik R. Indrakesuma ,  Jakarta   |  Wed, 04/30/2008 1:10 PM  |  Opinion

Universities are supposed to be the educational institutions that prepare students for real life. They are supposed to bestow certain skills upon their students: critical thinking, decision-making and responsibility. However, the current Indonesian status quo seems to throw them all out the window.

Students at the University of Indonesia are required to attend 80 percent of classes in order to be eligible for examinations. This mandatory attendance requirement is strictly enforced, and the university has even recently innovated by making an online attendance website in order to prevent signature forgeries and other methods of manipulating paper-based attendance.

The logic behind this mandatory attendance policy is simple: Students are innately lazy, thus they need to be threatened with harsh punishments, because otherwise they simply will not attend class.

Here's the thing: They completely misdiagnosed the problem at hand.

The vast majority of university students are those who enter the university by their own free will. In other words, they actually want to study there, they actually want to gain knowledge and insight on their future fields of work, and they actually don't need much persuasion to attend classes.

University students are also at an age where they are capable of making informed decisions based on the opportunity costs of their time. At the ages of 18-21, personality and brain development has already reached a stage of maturity such that students can make rational decisions about prioritizing what's most important in their lives.

However, one previously untouched element may very well turn out to be the real culprit behind low student attendance: the lecturers.

Students, as mentioned before, are rational. They also seem to be human, which economics defines as beings with unlimited wants and needs but limited resources. Time is one of these scarce resources. Thus, university students everywhere will be faced with time trade-offs almost every day, and there will always be an opportunity cost for attending any given class. This opportunity cost might be in the form of assignments for other classes that are due, the time to eat a proper lunch in the cafeteria, other activities such as part-time jobs and organizational work, or perhaps even a few extra hours of sleep.

Faced with trade-offs, students will attempt to maximize their utility within those time constraints. If class that day just isn't as important as the other available options, then students might simply choose not to attend, with full knowledge of the risks and consequences. Economists refer to this as an informed choice.

It logically follows that students who do not attend class regularly will find it more difficult to perform in examinations, because the transfer of information from lecturer to student will have been incomplete. Thus, this in itself will act as a built-in disincentive for skipping classes.

So, if university students are able to make rational informed decisions, and if any decision to skip class is an impediment to achieving good grades, then it means that students who require extra help will continue attending classes, whereas those who choose not to attend class probably do not need attendance to reach the same level of understanding as their peers. In that light, doesn't that make mandatory attendance obsolete and unnecessary?

It does. Or, at least, it should.

Here's the problem: Students will become dissuaded from attendance if lecturers are uninteresting. By definition, a lecturer's job is to educate and pass on information. This implies that it's about more than just the content, but also the delivery. In other words, lecturers who come across as boring, monotonous and uninteresting are not doing their jobs very well.

The bigger problem: There seems to be an abundance of old-fashioned, boring lecturers who seem to be unable to meet the educational demands of the current century, even at the University of Indonesia. This was made evident due to another recent technological innovation: online class registration for new semesters, where students are allowed to choose not only the course but also the lecturer. Because of this, lecturers with a reputation for boring people to death would get very few students registering for their classes, whereas the few good lecturers' classes are usually filled to the brim.

This is where mandatory attendance comes into play. When lecturers are boring and students are dissuaded from attendance, rather than solving the problem from its source (i.e. terminating the lecturer's employment and finding ones more suitable), the university chooses to protect the underperforming lecturers instead, by giving them the power of mandatory attendance requirements. An attendance requirement means that no matter how low the lecture quality, students must still attend. This, in effect, removes all incentives for the lecturers to improve their teaching skills and styles.

This has only resulted in inefficiency. Students are unable to learn properly due to the lecturer, and are also stripped of their power of decision-making over their own time. They will be forced to abandon golden work opportunities because they need to attend a class that is a complete waste of time due to the lecturer. At its worst, mandatory attendance even perpetuates dishonest behavior (signature forgeries, attending class for five minutes just to sign the attendance sheet, etc.).

The inefficiency doesn't stop there. Underperforming lecturers will never feel the need to improve their methods, while lecturers who teach well don't feel the full rewards of teaching to a full classroom.

Given these inefficiencies, it is clear what needs to be done. Universities need to abolish mandatory attendance, to stop treating their students like primary school students who take pleasure in playing hooky. Universities need to realize the real root of the problem: underperforming lecturers. And universities need to actually begin teaching independence, critical and rational thought, and informed decision-making to their students. After all, true learning only occurs when we make our own choices in life and deal with the consequences ourselves.

The writer, a student of the Faculty of Economics at the University of Indonesia, is a program assistant at the Association for Critical Thinking and a former delegate of the Indonesian national debate team.

Copyright © 2008 The Jakarta Post - PT Bina Media Tenggara. All Rights Reserved.