When I was an undergraduate, Glasgow University used to have a similar policy for first and second year undergraduates. If you'd met a certain standard--Honours level, basically--and passed some basic administrative standards, you didn't have to sit the final exams for the year. That was a genuine incentive to do well throughout the year, as when everyone else was slaving away preparing for final exams at the end of June, you could be sitting in the pub or hanging out in the park.
I don't remember what the attendance policy was for my high school or my son's.
You can tell kids don't smoke these days because young adults are very awkward with matches and lighters. That's probably relevant.
Are you allowed to take the final exam if you have a B but you want to try to raise your grade to an A? Or will that get you expelled for trying too hard?
What is an absence? Surely not just "a day when you didn't attend school". Does it mean absence without permission?
1: I have this idea of European Universities that no one actually attends classes. Unless there is a charismatic professor and then it's like Beatlemania.
7: well, what is it then? Any absence except for illness?
One thing that they can't do is change the grade distribution, though.
My professional life is increasingly dominated by Goodhart's Law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."
Annual performance reviews must follow a grade distribution, and it's a stingy one. On a four-point scale with four as the top grade, nearly half of the staff has to be graded as a "2."
And 5 to 10 percent must be "1." I have apologized to my boss (who is not responsible for this policy) for my failures to meet my incompetence quota.
Staff turnover helps here, though. If you leave my organization, you are the worst possible person and you are recorded in the system as a "1."
Likewise, I have to enter a monthly report on how much staff time and money have been saved through the use of AI. The results are ... creative.
M gives all of his students As. (His position is it's less work, and who cares.) Occasionally he'll have a student who has a poor attitude or doesn't seem interested in the class discussion, and he will take them aside and say, you're ruining the vibe, can you please stop coming to class and I'll give you an A anyway? Interestingly no one has ever taken him up on that offer -- they either drop out or try to shape up.
9: I almost literally called the OP title "Goodhart's Law" and then decided it wasn't quite an application of it, since attendance is the literal target as set by the state agency.
One of the more comical (to me, anyway) is the dance around "credit recovery" around attendance. You lose credit for the class if you miss more than 10% of the classes. But as long as you're above 75%, you're eligible for Credit Recovery. This means you have to show up somewhere detention-like, and every 15 minutes is worth 1 day of class.
(Or something like that. I'm not sure of the details, but you can knock out a week by showing up. And clearly you've recouped the value of that week's worth of missed classes. Detention will continue until morale improves or something.)
10: What grade does M teach? I'm hoping for first grade.
14: What? Is this at at high school or your university? And what happens at these "Credit Recovery" sessions? Do you bond with your classmates that belong to other social groups within the school?
I have to enter a monthly report on how much staff time and money have been saved through the use of AI. The results are ... creative.
>> ChatGPT, write me a report on how much time and money we saved this month through using AI.
I assume unexcused.
Apparently this is soooo naive.
17: Middle and high school.
I have no idea what happens at them, though. Wacky hijinks?
Actually, I bet dollars to donuts you sit at a computer and there's some curriculum the district purchased on a screen in front of you, and you either ignore it entirely or chatgpt your way through it.
19: Was I being excessively cynical? Perhaps! I really would have guessed any absences.
21: I think you'd risk getting into legal trouble if you didn't carve out excused absences.
22: I remember there being prizes for students who had perfect attendance.
Peep's guess would have been mine as well. Do you need a doctors for it to qualify as an excused absence?
"doctors note" I should say. Missing word there.
In my experience, everything that is about rewarding attendance in public school has no carve-outs at all. For penalties, whether your absence was excused makes a difference. But the rewards are purely about whether you were there, because that is a metric that the state cares about and so the school has to try to do something about it.
Private schools don't tend to have as strict of attendance polices because they know absences make the heart grow fonder and fond hearts make for donations.
I just glanced at the attendance numbers for my school district and they actually do seem alarming.
For the 2023-2024 school year:
- 92.4% overall attendance rate 92.4%
- 49.5% of students missed 10 or more days in the (180-day) school year,
- 23.9% missed at least 10% of the school days
- 6.9% missed at least 20% of the school days
- 34.5% had more than 9 "unexcused" absence days
For an adjacent, more suburban town, the numbers are 95%, 32% (10 or more), 9.4% (missed 10%), 1.7% (missed 20%), 3.6% (more than 9 unexcused).
Turning school into attendance is one of the big things that people talk about with the school-to-prison pipeline stuff, right?
I think that moving people directly from school to prison is a bad idea.
I have this idea of European Universities that no one actually attends classes. Unless there is a charismatic professor and then it's like Beatlemania.
This is a better description of Japan. In between breaking themselves to get into a good university, and breaking themselves at whatever full-time job they end up in, they get four years to relax.
24/25: no, it's a little more reasonable than that. I think that up to 3 days illness, a parent's word is good enough to make it excused. Over 3 days requires a doctor's note. (Obviously still problematic when doctors cost money, but not crazy.)
We've been banned from requiring doctor's notes under any circumstances.
26 is right, but I hadn't put my finger on that before.
It's either a HIPPA violation or a HIPAA violation.
27: When I went to public school, tardiness was a category on my report card as was your attendance rate. Not even mentioned by private school teachers.
(probably not, just playing the acronym game)
Of the 8 reasons given, one of them is concern about privacy of medical records. (Not actually a HIPAA violation, because after all the student is requesting the note.)
Prison might require 100% attendance but at least there's no final at the end of the term.
There kind of was for Red in Shawshank.
29: I thought it had to do with the school to factory pipeline. But I guess that only makes sense if there are factory jobs.
The best way to create factory jobs is to change the tariff rates every other week.
I for one love screwing tiny screws into iphones all day long.
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Ugh, I'm here at the hospital for my regular magnesium infusion*. It usually takes about an hour. At the end of the hour, the nurse came in to check on the line, and realized he had forgotten to turn it on. :(
*for migraines.
|>
There should be a magnesium vape pen or enema. Save time.
Speaking of vapes, there's a guy who comes to the gym in a jacked up pickup, which is not the local style. He's a white guy about my age with a huge chest full of muscles (probably) who has skipped leg day for his whole life. Or he's got a disability and I'm an asshole.
My dad had a cancer treatment infusion where they forgot to start the process after setting up the bag. This was during Covid where I couldn't enter the hospital. I came back after running an errand and texted to ask if he was ready and it turned out they'd just started.
I read the OP, and thought to myself: "same as it ever was". Heebie, what you describe is what I experienced in high school in the late 70s in Weatherford, TX. Heh, I used to sleep in class all day my last year (junior year) b/c I worked the night shift at the Jack-in-the-Box in town every night. Once I was so damn tired I didn't get out of bed, and 5 of 7 teaachers just marked me present, b/c they knew I was submitting all my assignments anyway. The other two weren't hard-asses -- they jsut hadn't thought of it. So I got sent to "detention" for those two periods, to "make up" for my absences. Ha.
What a farce.
I mean, the URL pretty much tells you the story.
46: Magnesium is kind of a miracle mineral. I read something about it helping as an adjunct treatment for depression. I do find it useful for anxiety.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/evolutionary-psychiatry/201801/magnesium-depression
That title sounds super cheesy, but the author is an actual psychiatrist, who acknowledges the limitations of the study.
I've seen neurologists in my health system recommend oral magnesium for migraines. How did you wind up figuring out that you needed an infusion?
53: Thanks, mc, I hadn't seen that! Eclectic web magazine and general Kyrgyzstan clearinghouse Unfogged comes through again.
Magnesium is great for depression because it's a component in sources of happiness like fireworks, parachute flares and thermite.