Grading Participation Helps Students

And the first step to participating is attendance

In my new (mis)adventures on Substack, I stumbled across "Grading attendance hurts students" from Jayme Dyer in the Threads feed. Dyer teaches biology and based on my very brief browsing of her site (stack? sub? newsletter? what the hell is this called again?), I am pretty sure we’d agree about most things.

But no, not this. In my experience, attendance (participation, actually) needs to be a part of a student’s grade.

Dyer’s argument against grading attendance is based on compassion for students and their complicated lives. I get that, and I hear a lot of similar things from many of my fellow writing teachers as well. I teach at an opportunity granting institution where my students are probably similar to hers (she teaches at a community college). We do have “traditional” students who are 18-21 and living on or near campus, the kind of student more typical at a place like U of Michigan (which is about 7 miles away from where I work, EMU). But we also have students who commute and some from quite a distance away, and that creates a variety of attendance problems. We also have a lot of students who have significant work and family obligations— and that isn’t just the older returning students, either.

Dyer mentions a “secret project” she’s working on that includes reviewing syllabi from dozens of other gen ed biology classes, and she highlights a couple of draconian policies where missing two or three classes could drop a student’s grade by a full letter. That seems crazy and unreasonable to me too.

That said, I don’t think it takes a lot of research for me to claim that students who miss too much class tend to fail. Sure, teachers need to have some compassion and understanding, and they need to remember students have lives where stuff happens sometimes. But to me, a reasonable attendance policy is just like all kinds of rules and laws for things people should do anyway, even if it is arguably a “personal choice.” Take seat belt laws, for example. I’m old enough to remember riding in a car and learning to drive myself before seat belt laws, and I rarely bothered to buckle up. The law requiring it (and the possible ticket, of course) gave me and many other drivers the nudge we needed.

At Eastern, legend has it that the Board of Regents once passed a policy that declared no student could fail a class based on attendance alone. I’ve never found evidence that this policy exists (though I haven’t looked very hard), but whatever. I don’t grade students on attendance; I grade students’ participation, and the first thing a student needs to do to successfully participate is to show up.

Now, Dyer and I are working in different disciplines. I teach writing and all of the classes I teach have 25 or fewer students. It’s obviously easier to take attendance with 25 students than in a lecture hall with 250, and it’s a lot easier for students in a small class to understand why they need to show up. I have no idea how many students Dyer is working with in her courses, but since she teaches biology, I assume it’s more than me.

I think also think we have different assumptions about what class meetings are for. Dyer writes:

Think about it this way – if a student misses a class, makes up what they missed and performs well on the assessment, should their grade really be lower than a student who attended class and performed equally as well on the assessment?

I think she thinks that the point of a class meeting is for an instructor to deliver content to students, and the measurement of a student’s success in the course is an exam. And I get that— as far as I can tell, this has been the STEM assumption about pedagogy and assessment forever.

In the courses I teach (and I think this is true in most courses in the humanities), we value the stuff students do in these class meetings. The new-ish innovation of the “flipped classroom” is how most people I know have been teaching writing forever. My courses involve a lot of discussion of readings, discussions and brainstorming about the writing assignments, and peer review of those assignments. So “being there” is part of process, and there’s no way to cram on an exam at the end of the semester to try to make up for not being there.

The other thing is that now that we have AIs that easily answer any question that might pop up on a gen ed intro to biology exam, it seems to me that this approach to assessing students’ success is going to have to change and change very soon. One of the many things AI has made me rethink about teaching and learning is if someone can successfully complete an assignment without attending the course, then that’s not a very good assignment. But that’s a slightly different conversation for a different time.

Anyway, here’s what I do:

Participation in my classes is 30% of the overall grade and it includes activities like reading responses, small group work, and peer reviews. I don’t have a good way of keeping track of the details of these things in f2f classes, so to figure out a grade for participation, I have students email and tell me what grade they think they have earned, I respond, and then I base the grade on that. I think this is a surprisingly accurate and effective way of doing this, but that too might be a different post.

Students can’t participate if they aren’t there, so I tell my students they shouldn’t miss any class at all. However, the reality is there are of course legitimate reasons why students have to miss. So my policy is students can miss up to four class meetings— or the equivalent of two weeks in a 15 week semester— for any reason whatsoever. Students can always tell me why they need to miss class, but that’s up to them and I do not ask for any sort of “note” from someone.

Students who miss five classes fail— or at least they usually fail. Since the age of Covid, I have lightened up on this a bit and I’ve made a handful of acceptions with a few students. I also recently started giving students with perfect attendance a very small bonus, often enough to make a half-letter grade difference.

I’ve had a version of a policy like this for my entire teaching career, and I am comfortable in asserting that students who miss two weeks of a 15 week semester are essentially fail themselves anyway. These students aren’t just absent a lot; they also don’t turn stuff in. So just like seat belt laws incentivized wearing a seat belt (and undoubtedly saved countless numbers of people), an attendance policy incentivizes the positive behavior of showing up. And I guarantee you that I have had students in classes who grumbled about being required to show up who would have otherwise failed themselves.