Students should be able to decide if they attend class or not without fear of a teacher dropping them.
According to the Pierce College Attendance Policy, “any student who has accumulated more than one week’s worth of unexcused absences by the census date (normally in the third week of a 15-week semester) will be excluded from the class.”
In some occasions, students are unable to attend class because of work, family emergencies or because they have a project that needs to be completed for a different class. Attendance should not keep students away from other responsibilities.
A lot of students at Pierce have jobs with a specific schedule, and resetting that schedule can be tough. Sometimes, it might even be harder to find a class that fits the specific hours one is looking for.
Imagine that the class you want to enroll in is only available during the hours you have work. As a result, you don’t regularly attend the class. Later you find out that you have been removed from that class. Wouldn’t that be miserable?
Withdrawing students from a class due to attendance is like punishing the students for wanting to work while trying to better their education.
Students are paying for the class, and if they are doing their work and meeting their deadlines, there is no reason for teachers to remove them. The students should be able to decide whether or not they attend the lectures. Teachers should not have the ability to decide that for them.
Another issue that may affect a student’s attendance is having to complete projects for another subject during the lecture of a different class.
In numerous courses, there is work that has to be completed outside of class hours. Students may have to attend an event during lecture hours and it is illogical for teachers to hold that against them by eliminating them from their class.
Every human being gets sick at some point and that is another reason why students may be missing class lectures, but that does not mean that they don’t care about the class or their education. Getting sick should not be a motive to remove students from a class.
Dropping students from a class because they might not be able to attend every single class meeting is unreasonable.
Attendance should not be an obstacle for these students to get to where they want to be. According to CNBC News, “more than 70 percent of college students have worked while attending school. And the number of working students has grown as college enrollment and tuition have increased.”
