Guest Opinion | Give me one good reason to go to class

Is attendance relevant to education?

The reason I pose this question is because I find class attendance to be the most emphasized and graded skill at Penn. Many professors at Penn have made attendance a top priority, and they have a variety of ways to ensure we show up. The traditional approach is, of course, to have a roll call.

But some professors are more surreptitious. Many apportion points of their rubric to class participation. Others sneak testable tidbits into the lecture, tidbits that are mysteriously excluded from the posted lecture notes. Some are as brazen as to refuse posting their lecture notes at all.

Sitting in class sometimes I can even see their lecture notes resting right before them on the podium, all neatly typed and organized, and I let out a frustrated scream in my head, "if you want me to learn what's in your notes, just give them to me." But they won't.

Here is where their concept of education differs from mine. It seems to me they want everyone to learn what's on their lecture notes - but they also want students who ditch class to learn less.

Ironically for me, ditching lectures, when I have gotten away with it, has always done wonders for my GPA. Instead of wasting precious hours of my life being bored and distracted, I can sit down, focus, and learn the material.

I understand that not every student works that way, but some do. And I am disappointed that even in college, at the pinnacle of customizable education, I am impeded from learning at my highest level.

The current system of underhanded attendance enforcement creates an unlevel playing field by discriminating against less popular students. Students who have friends for classmates are in a position to borrow notes-a luxury denied the rest of the class. Really popular kids can be discriminating in their search, and will likely access some of the best notes in the class.

But others, myself included, don't have the same pool of friends to borrow notes from. And I have discovered through experience that total strangers are extremely reluctant to share their hard work. And the buck doesn't stop there - even when I go to class there is no guarantee that I will wind up with good notes.

Sometimes I am served better by focusing on the lecture without the distraction of writing. Is my grade then to include my note-taking ability as well? All I want to do is learn the damn material from lecture.

So I had this great idea. I launched a Web site where people who take great notes can sell them to other students in the class, regardless of attendance.

Not surprisingly, when I presented my idea to Wharton's Venture Initiation Program, I was met with hostility. The professors who reviewed my business concept, as evident from their responses, were far less interested in paltry concerns of venture initiation than they were about the threat my site posed to their class attendance numbers.

What saddens me is that my Web site makes some professors feel threatened. It is treated like an enemy because it eliminates one of the tools in their arsenal for coercing students to attend class.

But, by ditching class, are students failing to perform their function as students?

Students come to Penn to receive an education, and if ditching works for them, so be it. To the contrary, if professors can't attract attendance without requiring it, then aren't they failing us? Aren't they failing to teach us something that we couldn't learn from a few pages of text?

I have high expectations from college - I am not here for a repeat of high school. I do not believe attendance is relevant to education. In fact, I believe it can detract from my education. I don't believe I should be penalized for my lack of networking skills or note-taking aptitude.

I deserve to learn the most I can, without impediment from petty professors who are more interested in filling lecture halls seats than my mind.

Daniel Schoenbrun is a Wharton junior from Fair Lawn, N.J. He can be reached at daniel.schoenbrun@gmail.com.

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