Opinion: UO’s attendance policy pressures students to pick between taking care of their health or taking a hit to their grades
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As cold and flu season rocks college campuses, I inevitably wonder whether I’ll get sick. However, instead of worrying about the toll on my body or tissue supply, I immediately brace myself for a grade drop. Many of my classes over the last year began with my professor telling us the University of Oregon changed its attendance policy, and illnesses no longer count as excused absences.
With the variation and lack of clarity on attendance from class to class, I wanted to test my opinion and see if I had the right to be frustrated.
The policy, passed by the University Senate in June 2022, outlines a “reason-neutral” approach to course absences. Professors became the main source of attendance policies as the university removed any institutional enforcement of excused vs. unexcused terminology. For students, this means that one class could give you four free absences, while another could dock you multiple points for each 10 a.m. you skip.
Ron Bramhall, UO’s associate vice provost for academic affairs, said that before this policy, professors weighed the value of students’ reasons for missing class on their own, determining what qualified as excused or unexcused. There was an existing issue of unequal access to doctor’s notes, which used to be allowed to merit an excused absence, but not anymore.
“It didn’t seem fair to us to say, ‘Well, if you have access to a private doctor you can get a doctor’s note, but if you don’t and you have to go to the University Health Center then you’re out of luck,” Bramhall said. Since UO’s Health Center does not write notes to excuse students with illnesses, the verification-by-note policy created inequity in those who ended up losing points for their absences.
With the inability to verify student absences, the professors were left to judge reasons by themselves. This is where inherent bias creeps into the decision-making process ––according to Bramhall, this bias is what the University Senate wanted to decrease.
After many discussions and grumbling sessions with peers, I saw this policy as a way to incentivize us to come to class no matter what. There have been a few classes where professors drop several attendance points, but most feel like your personal life and health come second to the classroom. This is where the emergency clause in the syllabus comes in.
“‘If you have some extraordinary thing happen, an emergency, an event [or] whatever [and] you come to me, you tell me that something’s happened and you need some time and you can have it,’” Bramhall said on how faculty write these emergency clauses.
One concern with the emergency clause is similar to the original issue with excused absences; faculty could use subjectivity or bias to weigh the gravity of students’ personal experiences. Many of the situations students find themselves in fall outside of the written guidelines for the policy, making professors’ decision-making processes more complicated and open to interpretation.
Bramhall explained that the new policy could leave students with real and immediate crises without the accommodations that could help them.
“If your attendance policy is not meant to improve the learning of students, then why do you have it?” he asked, posing the question professors should consider as they create attendance policies.
The policy implemented over a year ago was meant to balance “how much students attend, how much work they do and how much of that is needed to successfully complete the course,” Bramhall said. The university is “trying to level the playing field a little bit but allow for extraordinary circumstances.”
Without an understanding of the policy’s goals, students with personal circumstances feel confined to either sharing private information and taking care of their health or keeping up their grades. The communication of attendance policies should be clear and considerate of the lives students lead outside of school.