Should attending university lectures and classes be mandatory?

It is in my department.

So in general I think no, the uni shouldn't be actively penalising students for not attending lectures and ultimately it should be up to the students to start being an adult and taking control of their learning. I can however see a rationale for attendance taking and mandating for e.g. professional services degrees (like most healthcare courses) to ensure professional standards are met by the end of the course.

I also think from a duty of care perspective the university should have some level of oversight so if a student is not engaging with the course it will be flagged for review with their personal tutor. This can then ensure a) a student who is not engaging and has no intention of engaging can have a discussion about withdrawal rather than basically wasting their time and money on the course and b) to try and catch students not attending due to experiencing a personal or health crisis so the uni can support.

I'm talking to the point where lecturers take your attendance (like in secondary school)/you need to sign in to every lesson, you'll receive emails from lecturers/the department after not attending a few lecturers (going say 2 weeks in a row or more for example without having attended the lectures for the module etc), you attendance as a whole is tracked etc. So not simply the uni saying "they are mandatory" but in practice you wouldn't receive any disciplinary action for not attending them, nor does the lecturer or university actually truly care as to whether you attend said lecturers or not.

Seeing as the Christmas break is nearly over and I haven't seen a thread on this in a while I'd thought that I'd ask people for their opinions on this.

People seem to believe that attending lectures means increasing the likelihood of understanding the material, and that's simply not always true.

Suppose lectures were mandatory, then the students that didn't care to turn up in "optional" lectures, would turn up in the mandatory lectures, but not pay attention anyway. Perhaps they could disrupt, talk with others, use their phone and distract others within the lecture because they are "forced" or don't want to be there.

After all, they are adults, so forcing an adult to be somewhere they don't want to be, could result in the detriment of other's education.

A few years ago, a lecturer recorded the attendance of every student in the class for a very difficult module - one of the hardest modules in the entire degree. He wanted to discover if there was a correlation between attendance and grades.

He discovered that students that attended 90-100% of the lectures obtained a high grade of 75%+ average in the class. Therefore, the lecturer concluded that students should attend class as the most important factor. So, at the start of every new class, he told students to always attend lectures because their grade is related to their attendance.

The issue is, as many on TSR has stated before, that the lecturer made a classical statistical mistake: correlation is not equal to causation. In other words, attendance was not the reason why students were failing the class. There were many other factors.

What were the other factors? Well, it was a very difficult class. So students were unable to understand the mathematical material because they didn't have the pre-requisite background for the module. Thus, every time a student attended a class, they wouldn't have a single clue what the lecturer was explaining, because the lecturer assumed mathematical background that no one had, so the only students that were attending the class, were those who had the sufficient mathematical background to understand his lectures.

Therefore, his assumption that attendance was related to their poor performance was nonsense. Since the students found it futile attending lectures that were simply a waste of time, when a lecturer wouldn't explain a mathematical concept, so students stopped attending.

Hence, forcing attendance is detrimental. Not only could this cause a greater disruption in education, but, people who prefer to learn through reading and books may choose to optimise their learning and education by skipping certain lectures that they feel are unnecessary.

It depends on the subject of the lecture. I think students should email the lecturer before the lecture if they are planning to not attend the lecture for a certain reason.

What if the student has no valid unavoidable reason for not attending the lecture E.g they got hungover, they simply don't want to attend, laziness, failed to set an alarm so overslept, chose to hang out with friends and family instead etc. but still don't want to/will not attend the lecture? What would they do in this context?

Nice analysis, thank you for your opinion. I still think that attending lectures should be mandatory for all heathcare courses (vet med, med, dentistry, paramedic science, nursing etc) and for labs and maybe some STEM and languages courses but I can see why some believe they shouldn't be mandatory in other cases.

I'm doing vet med and I'm a person who doesn't learn from lectures very well, I simply am not a listening kind of learner. Whenever I go to lectures I get distracted, learn nothing, have a headache so I can't do more work at home when I often have 9-5s with lectures. If I had to show up to them I'm not sure if I'd be able to cope with the content and intense course. I do a lot of work in a way that is actually effective for me but it doesn't involve me being at uni, I passed with very good % for my first year and think I'm doing well overall. Most of the lectures are things you can easily make notes on, read about in textbooks etc. Our practicals, seminars etc are compulsory which I do always attend and think those being compulsory are important, but I don't think lectures should become compulsory even for healthcare courses. I don't generally recommend my approach to others as you need a lot of self-discipline, organisation to do the in your own time and you need to be sure lectures don't add anything to your learning, but that is the case for myself.

That's fair enough. I can still see why people believe that lectures should be mandatory for all heathcare courses. Even for my course (not going to state what it is) I can agree with lectures being mandatory (bar for one module based on the fact that most of the students across different cohorts (not me) don't like the module) but can see why some people don't agree.

Although, if lectures were made compulsory, why should the need for it to be compulsory be based on how much students like the module? I can think my cohort probably least likes immunology currently because it's so complex, but it is a very important subject so if everything was compulsory I'd say popularity shouldn't matter. Our lectures do get recorded and posted, so as you said we can go back to it - no practical things are done during lectures as that's why our practicals/seminars/tutorials are compulsory as we can't repeat that, but we can listen to a lecture again whenever.

Yeah I personally strongly agree with the principle of mandatory attendance and homework (no matter the age unless the teacher/lecturer is pants and can't teach properly or causes lots of confusion for everyone so you're effectively having to refer back to the textbook after every lesson anyway) but another part of me thinks but you're an adult now, surely you should be free to choose whether you'd like to attend lectures or not without fear of facing disciplinary action? Especially if you're one of the lucky students who can afford to pay for university fees all out of pocket (no student loan, no bursary, no scholarship, no government aid etc) or you have to pay for it all out of pocket.

I agree that attendance should be mandatory for all heathcare courses, maybe subjects like engineering and MFL and for labs too.

I think the problem with enforcing attendance at uni in general is that it just turns it away from a place of indepdendent learning to just "school 2" which ultimately devalues the degree because the students don't actually learn the skills that made such degrees valuable in the first place (which is not just the content being taught, and not even purely the "transferable skills" in research, writing, planning and so on, but also the softer personal life skills).

Too many people already approach uni like that, even thought it isn't - it tends to not work out too well for them but often they can then course correct. If they're essentially coddled by being corralled into doing what they should (and need to) figure out what to do on their own, for themselves, then how will they function when eventually, at some point, those safeguards are removed?

Yep this reminds me of sixth form where the teachers were banging on about needing to be more independent and stuff, and that you have more freedom but that was complete nonsense for me (despite how good my school was). You couldn't leave home early if you had no more lessons for the day (at least in Y12), teachers were checking to make sure that you used your frees for studying (you could have your playing cards confiscated for example if you were seen playing with them with your friends during your frees or as they liked to call them "study periods"), you had to be in for 8:30 every day even if your first lesson wasn't until 11:00 for example (relatives were shocked about this lol) and you were 18, some subjects enforced intervention sessions attendance (after school and lunch), folder checks happened etc. Not sure if they understood that independence goes both ways, I thought that more independence=more freedom? Honestly felt like I had more freedom in Y7-Y11 than I did in sixth form. Uni is just better (for now).


Yeah I just can't understand teachers who expect you to be independent but refuse to allow you to take responsibility for some things like this.

Note: I still think that teachers should be allowed to have meetings with you if there's lack of engagement in the course and your grades are poor (below a pass) and in the case of sixth form force you to attend every lesson but beyond that if you want the student to become independent then surely you gotta give them more freedom? 🤷🏾*♀️