We’ve all been in boring classes, the kind where time seems to stop. The types of classes where you start feeling sedated, and the cheap allure of scanning your Facebook feed becomes too much to ignore.

We pay a large sum of money to attend class here, boring ones and engaging ones alike. 

We stay here for a variety of reasons, but I’d like to think that it is the opportunity to learn from and with the best minds the university has to offer has something to do with it. 

We’ve all been in those classes, the ones where checking your phone is a foreign thought not because of a policy against it, but because the classroom is genuinely engaging. 

We as students are learning something true that is making us better human beings than we were when the class started. 

It is easy to figure out why students go to those classes. It is less clear why students go to classes for a professor to read PowerPoint slides to them, or for a class that leaves the realm of academia altogether and devolves into an ideological rant.

One reason is almost certainly attendance policies, which I believe should not be a part of any class’s syllabus.

Most classes on campus are three credit hours, meeting for a total of 150 minutes each week. That isn’t much time, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t painful if it’s misused.

Class time should offer something; it is a unique opportunity to bring together a group of peers to think about the important things in life that come out of a variety of disciplines, guided with varying degrees of intervention by an expert in that field. 

Nobody who deserves a college degree who has experienced a well-executed class would skip it “just because.”

But, in a bad class, in a boring class, why should students be forced to come by arbitrary means? Going to class is important, but how important could it be if it takes arbitrary force to get students into the classroom? 

I am a political science and journalism major-meaning most of my classes have been liberal arts, discussion-based courses that might not reflect how upper-level natural sciences, five-credit-hour calculus courses or career-focused business courses are taught. 

Coming from that experience, classes should have a natural consequence tied to poor attendance. Missing class will hurt your grade not because a missed class empowers a professor to tack a “minus” onto your letter grade, but because you missed something crucial to understanding the subject.

A classmate of mine missed a significant number of class sessions, yet still ended the semester with an A-, before the professor teaching that class docked him down to a C for his poor attendance. 

Yes, class attendance is important, except when it isn’t. If a student can not come to class and walk away with a good grade, we have to question why that student is required to take that course, and why the course is being taught that way.

An attendance policy reduces attention to the physical act of placing your physical self in a physical space. 

Perhaps in times past, when we weren’t carrying pocket-sized portals to the entrancing world of the Internet, simply being in class would be a good thing. Today, though, it is more distracting for students in class to be seated next to a game-playing, Pinteresting, fantasy-line-up-fiddling neighbor than it is to sit next to an empty chair. 

Requiring that body to be there to rack up points is insulting to the idea of a class. Osmosis does not work for education; you don’t get knowledge simply from being near it. 

Eliminating attendance policies let students who don’t want to be in class not be in class. If done well, those students will feel the effects of skipping class in a real way, rather than artificially at the end of a class. 

Designing a class to use the precious minutes in the classroom should be part of being a good professor, especially at a place like Ashland that prides itself on excellent teaching, and less on research and publishing. 

Eliminate attendance policies, and allow students to vote with empty seats. 

It could limit the number of distracted, Facebooking students in a classroom, and create an environment where each 50 minute session becomes an opportunity for growth.