Kelsey Warner opened her eyes as the alarm clock on her cell phone played David Bowie’s “Ziggy Stardust.” As she looked at the early hour on her phone, the battle began. Inside her mind, she debated as she often does whether to skip class.
As time ticked away, she made a decision: she would skip.
“Whenever I skip, I do something sweet,” said Warner, a sophomore in art. She said she uses the time to hang out with friends or go to the pool at a friend’s apartment complex. She said she puts on headphones, tans by the pool and reads a biography of the Grateful Dead.
Warner said she feels guilty for skipping. Missing some material from class has led to a harsh reality.
“Right before exams, I’d freak out,” Warner said.
She has good reason for this. Warner said her parents agreed to pay her bills as long as she keeps her grades up.
“I also have a partial scholarship, so these things go through my mind. But at the time, skipping is so fun,” she said.
Ron Severtis, a graduate student, teaches criminology and sociology. His attendance policy is that a student may miss up to two classes without it affecting their grade. He offered advice to students who intend on skipping his lectures.
“In my class, if you attend regularly, you’re bound to do better,” Severtis said. “Teachers often give hints like ‘this is important’ or ‘you may see this again’ and that gives good clues to study for tests.”
Severtis said during the current quarter the percentage of students who skip on any particular day is between four and 17 percent. This is two to 14 students out of a total of 46.
Overall, Severtis said that about seven out of 10 students attend almost every day.
“The percentage of students who skip can vary by day,” Severtis said. “Perhaps a more valid measure is the number of students who miss routinely. That number appears to be about 30 percent, or with a class of 50 about 15.”
In a poll taken of students passing through the Oval on campus, four out of twenty, equal to 20 percent, admitted to skipping class on a regular basis. This was defined as skipping at least once a week.
Severtis said there are multiple reasons why students skip. Besides simple laziness or to hang out with friends, Severtis said sometimes students have work or family responsibilities that prevent them from getting to class.
Severtis said he skipped now and then when he was a student.
“Sometimes work ran over, sometimes the weather was crappy, sometimes I was way too tired, sometimes I hated the course or the professor and just couldn’t get motivated to go,” he said. “In most cases it hurt me in the long run: not being there for notes, for a film, for discussion, for test hints, etc.”
Warner said skipping in college is easier than in high school.
“In high school it was such a pain to skip because you had to fake signatures and you risked getting detention or whatever,” Warner said. “But in college, no one cares.”
Severtis had other thoughts.
“Quite simply it boils down to: Is the student motivated? Do they value their education?” Severtis said. “There are so many students who care about learning and taking pride in doing the best they can that it makes you disheartened to see those students in college because they were forced to by their parents, they had nothing else to do or they take it for granted.”
