Saturday, May 12, 2012

The importance of attendance

One day I'm going to sit down and crunch the numbers on this, to get absolute proof. Regardless of the flaws in my data collection, I feel confident in saying that students who miss a lot of class end up with lower grades. And that's before the late penalty is added in.

For evidence I offer the following chart of grades and absences from two sections of the same undergraduate literature class. Notice the correlations after 9 absences--missing more than 3 weeks of class.

Average
Absences 
0.8975
0
0.9026
1
0.8749
2
0.927
2
0.8694
2
0.7117
2
0.887
3
0.8669
3
0.8654
3
0.8478
3
0.9609
3
0.8712
3
0.9296
3
0.9311
3
0.8658
3
0.8684
3
0.815
3
0.6684
3
0.8893
3
0.8951
3
0.8571
3
0.8492
4
0.8423
4
0.9549
4
0.9195
4
0.8682
4
0.8893
4
0.9124
4
0.8364
4
0.8088
4
0.9016
4
0.9133
4
0.921
4
0.9254
4
0.8686
5
0.8512
5
0.8427
5
0.8238
5
0.8084
5
0.7495
5
0.8531
6
0.5819
7
0.8561
7
0.8788
7
0.7998
7
0.884
8
0.8017
9
0.8985
9
0.7992
10
0.7742
12
0.7273
13
0.7956
14
0.7326
14
0.6206
16
0.7638
16
0.7191
19
0.4008
21



2 comments:

  1. 4 really seems to be the cutoff. You still get a couple of A-'s with 4 absences. But 5+ starts to preclude A's entirely.

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  2. That's interesting. 4 is how many "free" days they had. The penalties started kicking in at 5, but they aren't reflected in this chart. The penalty is 1 percentage point for each unexcused absence after the 4th. I wonder if the more engaged students tracked their attendance better?

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