UCL Attendance

Hi, I was wondering whether UCL is strict with their attendance? I am planning to go umrah during term time and would miss 10 days and I’m not sure what to do as the tickets have been booked already. Does anyone know whether it would be a problem? I’m a applied medical science and noticed I will miss 2 labs and a lot of lectures

Reply 1

artful_lounger

Universities Forum Helper

Officially I think you need to maintain 50% attendance for UK/home students (international students on visas need to maintain a higher attendance % as part of their visa requirements I believe). In my experience my department (a humanities course) seems pretty lax on enforcing it though. Other departments however may be stricter and they can withdraw you from the course for non-engagement potentially. Also two weeks of lectures and labs is quite a lot - that's 20% of the term. Unless one of those weeks overlaps with reading week (in which case you'll only theoretically miss one week unless there are timetabled activities for you in reading week, which some departments may do).

So it's hard to say. It's possible no formal action may be taken, but missing that much content during the teachign term may make it hard for you to get good marks in your assignments and exams (anecdotally - most of the people who miss/skip a lot of lectures also seem to have to resit and/or scrap minimum passes in stuff, from what I've seen). It's also possible they will flag that as non-engagement and request a meeting with you to understand why (and if you miss that, there may be more serious repercussions). Also for international students only, they run the risk of the home office revoking their visa...