Truancy rules unjust

When I received the syllabus for my English seminar this quarter, it looked like any syllabus I had received since I started here in the fall of 2000. There was the introductory paragraph, the list of required materials and the list of daily requirements.

It was not until I saw the attendance policy that I began to sweat, since the class only allows for one absence without penalty. Being a comparative studies and English major, my classes meet - almost exclusively - twice a week for two hours, and normally allow for two absences without penalty.

I had thought this "10 percent" absence policy was an Ohio State-instituted policy, since it seemed enacted in other departments from which I had taken classes. In Chemistry 121 - which had a lab every week - I was allowed to make up a missed session at the end of the quarter. In many science recitations with a quiz every week, the lowest score is dropped, a de facto attendance standard.

But an attendance requirement as fair as the one I had been used to is neither universal nor standardized. The more I asked around, the more I heard of notoriously strict policies.

In an English 202 class this quarter, a friend's syllabus notes, "Attendance in [weekly] recitation is mandatory: each unexcused absence in recitation will bring down your final grade by one full grade." Students in the Department of Industrial, Interior and Visual Communication Design - which is infamous for strict attendance mandates - have also voiced complaints as to overly harsh attendance requirements.

While these policies are unfairly strict, it is not to imply that certain teachers are trying to use them to punish students, or that teachers are being unduly harsh on purpose. Nor is it to say that teachers should not be allowed to decide the majority of what goes on inside their classrooms.

But there is a separation of powers in the university system - between the Ohio State administration speaking for the school as a whole, the chairs of different departments directing programs of study and the teachers handling microcosmic classroom occurrences.

For example, policies legislating academic misconduct and disability assistance - which are visible on every syllabus - are decided by OSU departments and every class must comply with them. Other educational elements are strictly departmental, such as pre-requisites and what classes are needed for graduation. Smaller scale decisions like required texts and assessment formats rest, appropriately, with the teachers themselves.

That balance of power has been skewed by allowing each teacher to set his or her own attendance standards.

It seems necessary that attendance allowances - such as the percentage-based standards used in most upper-level humanities classes - should be instituted by Ohio State the way misconduct policies are. The formation of a standardized OSU policy allowing for a certain number of absences would better provide for students, since most of those enrolled at Ohio State - regardless of major - face the same outside factors pressuring one's performance inside the classroom.

A university-wide attendance policy is especially crucial now, with the education process being aggravated by a poor economy, a shortage of graduate positions and an atrocious loss of state funding and double-digit increases in tuition rates. More than ever, students have been forced to double as workers and take on a myriad amount of extracurricular work to market themselves in a post-education pool.

And the many inflexible policies in courses around the university mandating near-perfect attendance unduly complicate a world that for students becomes more demanding by the day.

John Ross is a senior in English. He can be reached for comment at ross.465@osu.edu.