<p>Can a teacher legally drop me from a class after 3 absences? I’m halfway through the semester.</p>
<p>Legally? are you kidding? Sue him and find out…
Many CCs are crowded and you are taking someone else’s seat. No-showing regularly disrepsects the whole process. Besides, you should be taking your studies pretty seriously at this stage. If you have an emergency or medical condition, I’m sure the Prof will work with you.
Your teacher is signaling that your attendance is desired. If you don’t show up, at best, you’ll get a crappy grade.</p>
<p>^Right, CCs use attendance to manage a whole lot of things administratively. In fact, some forms of financial aid depend on the student’ showing up to his or her actual classes (obviously, people don’t want to pay someone to go to school when her or she is not actually going to school).</p>
<p>So, you should have received a course syllabus, often referred to as the “green sheet”. That piece of paper acts as an in-class contract between you and the instructor. You as the student must be held responsible for certain things, and the professor must also be held responsible for certain things. If the course syllabus clearly states that he expects students to attend class and he intends to drop students who do not regularly attend, then that is the contract you and the professor are agreeing to if you continue with that class. This is why the course syllabus is usually the very first thing a professor covers so that the student can gauge if they agree with this “contract” or not. Of course, if there’s anything outrageous (and you personally may feel it is outrageous for a professor to drop a student based on poor attendance), then the student can either drop the course and choose a different one (or a different professor for the same course), or the student can speak to the department dean.</p>
<p>Even if he or she cannot legally drop you, missing so many class meetings may have a serious detriment to your grade and some professors can take attendance into the “participation” portion of your grade as well.</p>
<p>I wasn’t saying I’m trying to skip class. 3 classes out of 16 weeks is not a lot of absences. I feel it’s outrageous for him to drop me when I’m really putting a lot of effort and participation into the class. I was only asking a simple question.</p>
<p>At the Us our kids applied to (and attended0, we were told by the Us that the instructor/profs were given pretty wide latitude in setting their attendance policies. One U told us that if our S missed 2 weeks out of the quarter, they’d might ask the student to withdraw and forfeit all his merit and other awards, EVENI if the absences were due to a documented pre-existing medical condition and the student was registered with the disabilities office.</p>
<p>The long and short of this is that you need to check your syllabus and see what the instructor has set forth as the attendance policy. If you realize you may have problems with attendance due to something you know about in advance, try working with the instructor in advance and see what the two of you can work out.</p>
<p>IF the absences are due to a medical disability, register with the disability office and you STILL need to work with the instructor to figure out how to get the work done and make up for any absences. There are a LOT of people who want to attend college and CC, so if you are not attending and keeping others from being able to enroll, schools take a pretty unfriendly view of this.</p>
<p>By the way, some classes only meet once a week and many only meet twice a week, so 3 absences can be quie significant (especially in the once a week classes).</p>