I am one of the few remaining attendees of my Monday 9am tutorial — for better or for worse. Typically there are three of us who grace the draughty 19 George Square room with our presence, and the hour consists mainly of empty seats, awkward silence and the echo of my tutor’s questions which are destined to remain unanswered. At times I half expect a tumbleweed to roll across the carpet in front of me.
With reading week having come and gone, attendance in the last couple of weeks has suffered the inevitable university-wide dip. Some students are catching flights back after the break, some still suffering at the hands of midterms, and some (including those missing from the aforementioned 9am) have simply fallen victim to the ever-tempting long lie. We’ve all been guilty of skipping, and giving classes a miss sometimes seems almost as acceptable as attending them — but why has this become the norm, and should it really continue to be?
Of course, it goes without saying that skipping class often isn’t a result of laziness. Many of my own peers feel that certain classes simply aren’t engaging or valuable enough, and their time would be better spent learning the material independently. Admittedly I can think of a couple of my classes which would be more productive if spent in the library. However as a language student, most of my contact hours are interactive tutorials with native speakers who can’t be replaced by any online resource. Unfortunately, even these are not exempt from the attendance epidemic — a suggestion that there is more to the culture of skipping class than a simple desire to pore over the missed material in the library.
As a generation which spent some of our formative school years with a Zoom call for a classroom, we are no strangers to the world of online learning. Recorded lectures make catching up on a laptop far more appealing than journeying to campus. However, the attraction of independent learning marks a slippery slope towards a more antisocial education style that doesn’t involve a campus at all. The rise of short-form content and access to AI is causing a rapid deterioration in our ability to think critically and focus our attention for long periods. Suddenly the idea of sitting through a two hour lecture becomes a very daunting one indeed, and the ‘university experience’ we all signed up for vanishes into thin air.
However valid the excuse for skipping, if attendance is dwindling something has gone wrong. In the age of ChatGPT, contact hours need to offer us more than a lecturer reading monotonously from a PowerPoint presentation. Attendance will increase when classes provide an experience that can’t be replicated from the comfort of our own homes. Equally, an effort from students to ditch the AI and engage fully in the courses we signed up for will go a long way towards keeping the university culture we know and love alive.