Opinion: Attendance and Fines

Dominic Nappi

(edited by Brianna LeBlanc)

Nothing is as arbitrary as attendance. We pay thousands of dollars to go to school just for the administration to force us to go to events just for the sake of having people go. No one deludes themselves into thinking that if they didn’t make us go to assembly that people would actually show up because it is just an infinite waste of time. It’s a crap shoot whether or not it would actually be beneficial to us by providing information we could actually use and 90% of the time it doesn’t. The fines are just a way to try and make us go to something they feel is important. The fact that they fine us for missing worship credits somehow make it even worse. “Come worship God with us three times a week or we’ll fine you.”

I mean what kind of message does that send? Worship should be a choice and not a mandatory, fineable offense. We, as students, have a million and a half things to do and make the decision of what we have to miss in order to complete these tasks and not appear at things just out of a fear of being fined.

Class is the same way. It shouldn’t be reflected in your grade that you didn’t show up to class a few times if you understand the material and you turn in all your assignments. Of course there’s nothing making you turn in your assignments on time except for yourself, and they do force you to go to class.

To backtrack a little bit, students have so many things to do and if you feel that missing a class might help you benefit from a little bit of extra sleep or completing an assignment after class, that should be entirely your choice. It’s your money; you should be able to dictate what you do, where you do it and how it gets accomplished. Forcing us to show up to things is essentially the grade school equivalent of saying, show up because I said so and that is final. Such a thought process is not just juvenile, but it’s insulting.

They say when you go to college that you’re starting your adult life and you finally receive your freedom that you’ve been looking for your entire life. But yet, even though you’re an “adult” they don’t trust you with the simple decision of deciding when and where you want to be? That’s just false advertising. They have to enforce their events with fines just to try and make sure that people show up. The same way they try and force us to show up to class by counting our attendance into our grade. We should be able to go and do whatever we want without fear of being fined or our grade suffering for it.

What do we have to do to gain this right? Personally I’ll gladly take the fines because I don’t care what they say or do, I’m not going to their stupid events unless I feel like it.

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