A former professor of mine had a theory about journalism. It involved three steps to measure the accuracy of media reporting in general. 1) Take any event that you witnessed directly and that was subsequently reported in the press. 2) Compare what you actually saw to the version of the story reported. 3) Extrapolate from the two and you can get a pretty good measure of the accuracy of any story that you see in print or on screen.
The latest frenzy about attendance policies is a case in point. I was on the Faculty Senate's Student Instruction Committee that designed the recent draft, and I am astonished at the degree to which the reports on both its content and its intent have distorted the real purposes of the proposal.
It seems part of the reporting has been based on some misguided idea of current polices at WVU. The fact is that at the present time THERE IS NO UNIVERSITY POLICY THAT EXCUSES A STUDENT FROM CLASS FOR ANY REASON. Instructors now set their own attendance polices and the new drat proposal does nothing to change that. The draft does encourage instructors to insure that any such policy be "appropriate for the goals and instructional strategies for their courses, but this is wording that describes practices we hope are already prevalent.
There are some real changes in the proposal, however. First and foremost is the change from a policy on "absences" as termed in the current undergraduate catalog to one on "attendance." This new wording is not a change in policy, but it does represent a significant shift in perspective, and is based on conclusions of both research and common sense: students who go to class have significantly higher rates of success than those who don't. I think that, despite differences on approaches, all involved at WVU can agree that the long term success of our students is our most important goal.
Much has also been made of section 2 of the new draft, which states that medical providers do not excuse students from class. This again is not a change from current policies. Instructors may accept or refuse illness as an excuse for an absence. Of course many do excuse absences due to illness, and many will continue to. The Committee struggled long and hard with the question of excuses from the Student Health Service (UHS). We spoke carefully and at times heatedly with representatives from UHS who outlined some of the major problems posed by professors who require students to obtain "excuse slips" on campus.
Like many public services, UHS has limited personnel and funding and must focus its efforts on students who are seriously ill. It cannot deal effectively with those, sometimes numerous, who crowd their facilities simply to get an excuse from class. I should mention that the climate of fraud and misrepresentation that results from this can have a devastating impact on the internal morale and the external reputation of WVU--an impact that hurts most directly students who obtain degrees from our programs.
Further, the Committee felt that students with the severe cold, the flue and other such illnesses are usually better off at home in bed than running to the infirmary, there they can only spread germs and get an aspirin. The wording perhaps still needs work, but the purpose of this proposal was to prevent instructors from straining the resources of the UHS by requiring medical documents that are both unreliable and unnecessary.
There is also a serious misunderstanding of section 4 in the proposal. Eric Miller recently quoted half of this section (a sentence that thanks to him will surely be reworded), thus giving a very skewed view of its real purpose. The sentence omitted by Miller is: "Students taking courses with regularly scheduled evening examinations shall have the right to make up these examinations if they miss an examination in order to attend a class that meets at the same time."
The object here is to make clear that courses that schedule exams outside regular class time do not have priority over regularly scheduled classes. No student should be forced to miss one class in order to sit for an exam in a class that meets at another time. The Committee hopes this change will alleviate some of the scheduling problems students now face too often.
The proposal would therefore require instructors giving exams outside regular class hours to provide makeup for students caught in this bind. The Committee felt strongly that students should have this new right.
Ironically, faculty reactions to the current proposal suggest that is does too little to encourage (read "require") class attendance across the board, In fact, the Committee debated a stronger University-wide policy, but in the end it recognized that different classes may need different instructional strategies. A philosophy class could have a very different approach to learning than, say, a class in orchestra performance (or in my case language). One may rely on individual reflection, the other on regular interaction among students with the instructor. The current draft does suggest that instructors may "permit each student a number of 'allowed absences,' in the hopes that this approach may eliminate the sometimes humiliating process of obtaining excuses.
That may work in some classes, but ultimately we must rely on instructors' best judgment and each student's desire to learn. Those two elements together will make or break our reputation as a university. And nothing could be more harmful to students than the failure to maintain that reputation.
Michael Lastinger is a guest columnist, member of the Student Instruction Committee, and Professor of Foreign Languages at West Virginia University.