‘These regulations do not stipulate a minimum percentage of attendance before a student is permitted to appear in any test/examination.’ These are the words written, with no room for ambiguity, on the fourth page of the Academic Regulations of BITS Pilani.
The Academic Regulations, for those unfamiliar, is the document that defines the structure and function of all academic activity within the institute, across all of its various programs. It defines everything from the two-semester system, the letter grades that are awarded, to the nitty-gritties of credit and course requirements for graduation.
The “0% attendance” policy refers to the aforementioned statement, which, while clear on its objective, leaves a lot of room for the instructor-in-charge of a course to determine how to enforce attendance. Historically, these methods have been what one can term as ‘unofficial’ but recently they have become official.
When talking about unofficial methods of imposing attendance, the most obvious example is unannounced or surprise evaluative components. These are usually quizzes conducted in the tutorial hours for which no prior notification is provided to the student. As such, the student is then forced to attend their classes if they do not wish to miss out on marks. After going through the handouts available, it is observed that out of the 306 courses offered to first-degree students, 35 contain such components. Eleven of these 35 courses are offered by the Department of Mathematics.
Certain departments, like the Department of Pharmacy, mention in multiple handouts that ‘Attendance in lectures and tutorials are all equally important as they are all integral components of learning, irrespective of weightage and may be taken into consideration, during grading’.
However, since last semester, a more official method of enforcing attendance has been implemented. Referring to an older interview with the student senator, Aditya Chittem, by The Fine Print, it was seen that the senate approved course structures where evaluative components worth up to 10% of the final score can be tied to a minimum attendance of up to 50%. Another common method seen in multiple courses was ‘class participation’. It often presented itself as QR codes displayed during lecture hours that had to be scanned by students, with marks attached to the exercise.
Analysing the handouts for this semester, 32 out of 306 courses feature attendance-linked evaluative components or class participation components.
In conversation with students from multiple disciplines, we found that the attitudes towards attendance vary drastically across departments. Students shared that some departments, like the Department of Biological Sciences, have always had an unofficial expectation of attendance from the student body, with professors often considering regularity in class when dealing with edge cases in grading.
Recently, an email with the subject ‘Your Responsibility as a BITSian’ was sent by the Director to all students. The email included a portion urging the student body to be regular in attendance for lectures and to mark their attendance on the face scanners present in each classroom regularly, citing class attendance as ‘an essential pillar of higher education.’
This stands in stark contrast to the earlier attitude of the administration towards attendance, as learned through conversations with students on campus from the ‘21 and ‘20 batches. They mentioned that there was no compulsion—formal or informal—especially towards the first years, to attend classes from the instructors or the administration.
Looking at the facts presented in front of us, we can confidently say that there has been a marked change in campus culture towards attendance as a concept. These changes also seem to have accelerated over the previous semester. Currently, around 10% of all courses offered this semester have unofficial or official attendance expectations. Whether or not this change is a good thing remains an open question for everyone associated with the academic system at BITS Pilani.