My friend works at Hunter and recently showed me an e-mail she received about a change in policy regarding attendance. According to this e-mail, which will be followed up by a campus wide meeting, faculty are no longer allowed to factor attendance into a student’s final grade. This is all me paraphrasing but they are not supposed to use the word “attendance”, and instead should refer onto to “class participation.” New syllabi cannot contain the word “attendance” anywhere. This seems like a pretty big policy change. I am so interested to find out if this was a result of disability activism at Hunter, or more about financial constraints on students who work, have families, or must commute long distances (especially given the lack of subsidized Metrocards.)
Does anyone in our class teach at Hunter? Is this happening at any of the other CUNY colleges?
I am also interested to see how this will fuel larger conversations about the future of education, the potential for online classes, or hybrid classes.
olivia dunbar
this is pretty interesting. i wonder what the implications are, as you write this maybe is part of larger conversations around where classes are actually taking place (i.e. online or hybrid), i wonder how the instructor’s job description/responsibility changes. what makes me weary is not that students don’t get penalized for not being physically present in class, but rather that there is still some entity that is recording the students’ activities. like the idea that in online education people are somehow monitored less, but actually one could argue they’re monitored more because the data is so easily/inherently collected.
Francesca Petronio
I know what you mean, I was actually really turned off by classes I took as an undergrad that tracked what documents I opened, and how much time was spent on certain screens. I wonder what programs they will implement to track students in lieu of recording attendance.