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 Song
Analysis
Critique
of Alaa Ridha's Song Analysis
Jonathan Nellis
January 28, 2003
How To Learn: A Students Choice
Many courses are starting to have strict attendance policies that
require students to attend their classes. Students who fail to attend
class can face punishments as severe as failing the coarse or receiving
large grade deductions. There are may reason why strict attendance
requirements are not a benefit to a student’s learning experience.
The benefits of required attendance are small. If a student knows
in advance that not attending will definitely result in a poor grade,
they may be more likely to attend. However, these policies punish
all students for the action of a few. If a student can do well on
the exams and assignment without attending class, then that should
be his or her choice weather to attend or not. Most of the students
that would not attend a class will not try hard to learn even when
forced into attending. Most of the people that come to school to
learn will attend class and do well regardless of these policies.
Attendance policies also introduce a potential to punish students
that cannot attend class for reason that are unavoidable. A coarse
that has few days that a student is aloud to miss before being punished
is the most likely to have this problem. A student could become
very ill or have some other reason for missing many days of class.
If the student is able to learn the content under these circumstances
or catch up afterwards they should not be penalized. Attendance
policies would not work if teachers could accept excuses because
a student could easily make something up. According to Eric Miller
from the Daily Athenauem, “The proposal is unfair to those
who have legitimate reasons to miss class.” Eric also points
out that “your professor does not have to accept an excuse
from UHS, any other medical service, the weather channel, or even
the Pope.” This could be detrimental to students that can’t
attend class because of a major event happening in their life. Classes
that only allow a few absences would penalize the most students
in cases such as these.
A few courses have good reasoning behind their attendance policies.
When a student can learn the content of the coarse without attending,
they don’t loose much of the experience by not attending. There
are a few exceptions to this rule. If the coarse does not have exams
or assignments to test the students learning, they should be required
to attend in order to pass the class. Labs or other hands on classes
also should require attendance.
If classes did not require attendance, students that do not attend
and do not try to learn the content outside of class will be punished
when they do poorly on exams. Requiring attendance adds the students
that can learn content out of class the list of people being penalized.
Punishing people for not attending is unnecessary because the people
that these penalties are intended to hurt will already fail the
class when they receive poor exam grades.
Jonathan Marshall brought up an alternative to the standard attendance
policy that exists in many classes today. He suggested that “students
who come to class regularly should be rewarded for there attendance,
and those who do not attend class should be measured simply on their
proficiency in learning the subject material.” This is a great
way to reward students for attendance without punishing all the
students that choose not to attend.
Attendance requirements are designed to help students learn but
are usually unnecessarily strict and punish those that don’t
need to be punished. There are alternative ways to encourage student
attendance. I don’t think that the current method of requiring
attendance is very affective and needs to be rethought.
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