Should Attendance Be Mandatory With Recorded Lectures?

I sat down in my 9 a.m. philosophy class last October, watching Dr. Martinez set up her microphone, and realized I could be watching this exact lecture from my dorm bed three hours later. My roommate Emma never came to our statistics course, claiming she learned better from the recordings at double speed while meal-prepping on Sunday afternoons. She pulled an A minus. I dragged myself to every session and earned a B plus. That gap haunted me through midterms until I admitted what bothered me most: maybe showing up was less valuable than I had been taught to believe.

With lectures now available on demand, colleges face a genuine question about whether physical attendance should remain required. After wrestling with this tension throughout my sophomore year at Michigan State, I have come to believe that mandatory attendance policies no longer serve their intended purpose and often harm the learning they claim to protect.

Growing up in Grand Rapids, I absorbed the belief that education meant sitting in rows while an authority figure spoke. High school took attendance every period, and missing three unexcused days brought a call home. I arrived at college expecting the same structure, but my first semester syllabi revealed a split: one professor required attendance for twenty percent of the grade while another said frankly that we were adults and she would not police our presence. The technology created this choice. Universities started recording lectures around 2010 for accessibility, then expanded the practice after 2020 when remote learning became necessary. Now almost every lecture hall has cameras that automatically upload videos to the course portal within an hour. This shift has forced educators and students to reconsider what it means to attend class when the content exists independently of the room.

Mandatory attendance treats students as children who need external discipline rather than adults managing their own education. When my cognitive psychology professor, Dr. Chen, required attendance but offered nothing in class beyond reading his slides aloud, I felt insulted sitting there. The policy assumed I could not judge whether my time was better spent reviewing my biology notes before a lab practical. I learned more psychology by watching his lectures at one and a half speed the night before exams, pausing to look up terms I did not understand, than I ever did fighting sleep in his 8 a.m. slot. My friend Marcus works thirty hours weekly at the campus bookstore to afford textbooks. Forcing him into a seat when he could absorb the same information during his lunch break penalizes him for circumstances beyond his control. College costs too much and demands too much to waste hours on policies that measure compliance instead of comprehension.

The recordings also reveal that not all lectures deserve attendance. My American history professor, Dr. Okafor, builds each class like a conversation, cold-calling us on primary sources we read beforehand and letting debates develop organically. Those sessions cannot be replicated by a video because the value lies in the collective thinking, not the information transfer. I attend every one, even when I feel awful, because missing it means missing something unrepeatable. But my calculus professor projects pre-written solutions to problem sets and works through them silently. The recording captures everything useful about that class. Mandatory policies fail to distinguish between these experiences. They force attendance where it adds nothing while failing to make genuinely valuable sessions more engaging. If a lecture can be fully replaced by its recording, the problem lies with the lecture design, not with students who recognize that fact.

Supporters of mandatory attendance argue that showing up builds discipline and that students who skip class perform worse academically. My freshman year resident advisor made this case, insisting that the habit of attendance mattered more than any single lecture's content. I respect this view because structure does help some people thrive. My own grades improved when I treated college like a job with set hours. But correlation does not mean causation. Students who skip class might struggle because they are overwhelmed, working multiple jobs, or dealing with mental health crises, not because absence itself causes failure. Punishing them with grade deductions adds stress without addressing the underlying issue. When I missed a week of classes last spring during a depressive episode, the attendance policies made returning harder because I had already lost points I could not recover. A better system would focus on whether students meet learning outcomes through exams, projects, and participation, regardless of how they acquired the knowledge.

I still attend most of my classes, not because syllabi threaten me but because I have learned which environments help me think. Live lectures force me to take notes by hand, which research suggests improves retention, and they remove the temptation to pause for distractions every few minutes. But that choice works for me, with my learning style and my schedule, and it might not work for the single parent in my sociology seminar or the student athlete who travels every other week. Recording technology has handed us a tool that makes education more accessible, and clinging to mandatory attendance wastes that opportunity. I do not have a tidy answer for how to make students care about learning, but I know that forced presence without genuine engagement teaches nothing except resentment. Perhaps the real question is not whether students should be required to attend, but whether we are creating classes worth attending in the first place.

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