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Dear David & ISL Colleagues Here at the Crewe site of MMU we have, in theory, a 75% attendance requirement, but it has yet to be tested in anger. In the last academic year we invested a very large number of person houses in developing an Access database for student attendance, recording their absences from lectures and 'follow ups'. However, this did not provide the cast iron data that we would have needed to invoke failure through non-attendance. This was partly because it took so long to get all the names right, and partly because students just love to attend any session other than the one they are supposed to be in. (We have no proper lecture theatre so our biggest lecture is only about 100, which means multiple runs of everything). This year the system is better, but the students still 'wander' from group to group. We are again investing a huge amount of person hours, and are chasing up those first years that don't show up. This seems to be having some positive effects, but the old DIY manual registers would have allowed us to achieve the same effect at a lower cost. So what is the point of this rambling? I think it is probably to suggest that it is all too easy to tackle the 'wrong' problem. Why are we assessing students' attendance in the first place? Surely if in HE we really operate a criterion based assessment system, all that matters is whether the students are up to the standard in the assessments. It does not matter if they skip my (boring) lectures. However, if we are into payment by results, then all this monitoring and control may perhaps matter. Does anyone have views on this? Peter Cuthbert Department of Business & Management Studies Manchester Metropolitan University Crewe Green Road Crewe CW1 5DU 0161 247 5228 %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%