In traditional lecture classes I count attendance as 5%. That seems
to work.

In classes which have lots of group discussion, meet only once a
week, or have a team project, it goes up to 30%. In those classes
much of the learning is cooperative learning and absentees miss out
on that.

Also, sometimes if I notice a student starts the course with a high
absentee rate I email them and gently suggest that perhaps they
should take the course later when they can attend. That seems to get
their attention that someone is watching.

The team projects are one of my big concerns. A person that is
absent misses learning the material that everyone needs to
understand to make the project successful. Absenteeism automatically
heaps more work on the other members and can negatively affects the
final presentation. I let teams do a team evaluation to identify
slackers and reserve the right to adjust individual scores based on
the evaluation and my follow-up investigation.

On 1/11/09, pixie to bernoulli wrote:
> What percentage of the total points do you count as
> participation and attendance. I had many absenses last semester
> and I want to be more strict about it. Thanks!
>
>
> On 1/05/09, bernoulli wrote:
>> On 1/05/09, TennEducDoc wrote:
>>> How do you feel about providing notes (in advance) for
>>> class that are from your Powerpoints prepared for the class
>>> lecture? I post mine in pdf form on our D2L webpage.
>>> Several of us were discussing how it discourages
>>> note-taking during the lecture. I feel that it frees the
>>> student to participate in the class discussion without
>>> having their heads down in the notebooks and laptops. There
>>> will always be points that are not in the Ppts notes that
>>> need to be notated. There are some profs who will not allow
>>> any use or downloading of Ppts by their students. There is
>>> also the point of "Why come to class if you can download
>>> his notes?" Aside from an absence policy, I have a
>>> "participation" grade to cover that. That is purely
>>> subjective, I suppose, but it provides me with the power to
>>> encourage attendance and participation.
>>
>> I provide PowerPoints with room for notetaking. I don't have
>> notes on my PowerPoints to give if I wanted to. For
>> undergraduate students I don't make them available in advance.
>> I usually hand out copies and post the ppt file on Blackboard
>> afterward for reference.
>>
>> I also give points for attendance and/or participation. When I
>> don't do that my absentee rate doubles.
>>
>>

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