On Jul 24, 2024, at around 5:00 PM, students received an email with the following subject: “The “W” grade is gone!”. However, the Dean AC had not forgotten to add an ominous “However” subsequently in the subject.
The Cards on the Table
A few eons ago, W grades were the default tool of choice professors wielded against students: less than 85% attendance (and later 75% attendance) could lead a student to fail in a course. This was a grade in the course in the same boat as the coveted S and the dreaded E; it was equivalent to failing the course and would leave an indelible mark on the transcript. This evidently was a huge strain on students especially those struggling with mental health issues, and in the grim atmosphere following the events of Jan-May 2023, the admin seemed to provide some respite in the form of the P grade.
The P grade promised much; you could never fail a course anymore for attendance. However, it excluded the student from make-up (if you miss an exam and have a valid reason) and supplementary (if you fail a course), and grade improvement (to improve your grade from E to D) exams. Multiple P grades in a semester could lead to parents being notified and a subsequent escalation. It also prevented application to PoRs; although this wasn’t too bad since this only meant ratified PoRs and one could still do most of the non-ratified PoRs without any hassle.
Parallely, the CollPoll/Digicampus application was developed: intended to track students’ attendance, and biometric attendance was instituted in many classrooms. Digicampus did many things, one of which was that it showed the attendance to-date precisely. It also notified the student and their parents if their attendance was too low. If only it had had a built-in calculator to compute the number of classes one needed to attend to maintain the desired attendance threshold (or to show that their fate was doomed), one couldn’t ask for more.
That changed however as July-Nov 2025 began. Students opening their Smail for the first time since the summer were greeted with warm wishes and hopes that their summer had gone well. This was however followed by less amicable news. A flurry of new updates, to reinforce the consequences of a P grade, were announced. Starting from this semester, for SEAT allocation (the program for courses allotment during course registration) and IDDD registration, students with a lesser number of P grades would be given a preference. Too many P grades would also preclude students from getting a minor, honors, and YRF projects. Only P grades from this semester would be counted and not past previous P grades, thus giving us some leeway.
Opinions
When the W grade existed, professors were hesitant to hand out W grades. Indeed, this was tantamount to failing a student and could be considered extreme in most cases; the student would have to redo the course. Attendance was also maintained manually for the most part, and proxies were rampant.
The P grade hoped to be a safe haven for professors and students alike. On a day to day level, the P grade in theory meant that a student no longer had to be in constant worry about whether or not they would graduate, or live constantly guilt tripping themselves over one alarm they slept through. While for professors, it wouldn’t be as unforgiving as failing students and the student could still hope to graduate comfortably.
However, this has quite a few problems associated with it.
At the outset, it is important to engage with the argument repeatedly provided by the admin about the need to encourage and reinforce attendance by providing negative reinforcement in terms of SEAT/IDDD downgrades, that is, the professors show the correlation between attendance and performing positively in the course. It is valid to want to enforce a certain educational standard in the academic sphere, but there is a case to be made against the existence of a P or a W grade broadly, and in specific the practice of performing negative reinforcement by pathways that are independent and the orthogonal to the courses, by threatening broader aspects of one’s life as a student.
A great many colleges in India or abroad do not in fact have an attendance criteria, to respect the fact that students are at the end of the day adults who ought to make their own decisions. It is completely possible that students have their own preferred methods to engage in learning the course material, and the classroom lectures may not often be a one-size-fits-all solution for them. There is often an all too familiar sensation of a classroom lecture going over one’s head and vowing to catch up on it in your non-class time. The problem that a mandatory (or an effectively mandatory) attendance policy poses is a scenario of double jeopardy for these people to whom the classroom is not necessarily the best learning outcome – the first jeopardy of being forced to attend class and not learning much from it, and the second jeopardy of having to spend an increased amount of non-class time trying to catch up. Ultimately, choosing to attend or not attend a class is an academic tradeoff, because at the end students are still evaluated by assignments and exams.
Another thing to consider is the aspect of the departments improving courses. If fewer students attend the class, that is sufficient incentive for the department to re-evaluate and restructure the course and is in itself feedback to the department. If a course has poor attendance, the onus is now on the department to make the course more relevant and appealing to the students. If the course is good, more students would attend, and this is a virtuous feedback cycle. With P grades, the appeal to the students is unclear. Departments cannot deny the all-too-often unfilled TCF forms, and perhaps taking a hard look at courses with low attendance is often the most true ground reality feedback that they can get.
An argument provided by the admin seems to be that this is a residential campus and one has no reason to bunk classes. While the first part is true, it is missing the point that students might have other priorities. One should attend classes just because they’re there is not enough reason; if insti hadn’t been residential, would they not implement the attendance rule?
Suggestions?
To start with, contacting parents should be stopped. Students are independent, some of them have travelled three-thousand kilometers across the country to come here. Students are adults and preferred to be treated such, infantilizing them would not have positive results.
If course instructors feel the need to encourage attendance, then maybe instead of trying to penalize students by not allowing completion (despite how well they may have done in the evaluation checkpoints along the way) and completely orthogonal penalties like jeopardizing their chances in SEAT or IDDD conversion, they ought to look for reinforcement mechanisms that acknowledge the tradeoff, and perhaps adopt positive reinforcement than negative. One recent example that comes to mind, where certain HS professors were giving mark bonuses based on attendance during the long weekends in April.
