The vicious cycle of mandatory attendance

A friend threw a question at me yesterday – “Should attendance be mandatory in undergrad colleges?”

It takes us to the fundamental input vs outcome-linked model. Let’s break that down.

If books can teach everything and the teachers in class and debates between students add little value, while the exams are linked purely to the books, then there is no true worth to attending a class.

If books can only guide students to learn while the teacher can take it a notch up and help in the application of those learnings, encouraging debates and discussions in class, whether or not the exams are linked to mugging up the textbooks or are application oriented, there is merit in attending the class.

In college, all of us have gone through both these types of classes – the ones where the teaching is only a verbalization of the book and the ones where the teaching is so many notches higher in giving insights that the textbook becomes only a supporting guide.

So, the onus is really on educational institutes to be able to provide quality teaching to attract students to the class and get quality outcome. Reducing learning to an input based, mandatory attendance model is detrimental in the long run.

And do you know how detrimental? Let’s move on to the step after college. These students become office goers, the two types there. The input-focused ones and the outcome-focused ones.

The former exhibit and inculcate a culture of spending time in office, putting in long hours, staying till lights go off, speaking about how they spend 14 hours in office because life is a ‘desk-sitting’ competition, analyzing every other colleague from that perspective.

The latter work towards outcomes, have sensible meetings when required, stretch hours if there is an urgent team delivery involved, pack up and go home when the outcomes are achieved, and take flak from the input-focused team for leaving in ‘half a day’ when leaving at 6 pm.

So, perhaps it is time to start at college, to help students understand how value addition needs to be measured so that we can build better team leaders, managers, business heads, and CEOs. Who fill focus on adding value to their clients and shareholders rather than increase the OpEx with an extended use of electricity and pantry in office.