There are two things I absolutely cannot stand about lower division English classes: the attendance policy and pop quizzes. They’ve bothered me for as long as I can remember, but last week I finally reached my breaking point.
5 am Wednesday morning, I wake up to the most awful feeling in my stomach. Shortly after, my head is in the toilet and I’m throwing up last night’s dinner. Fast forward to 8am and I’m on my way to class. That’s right. Somehow I muster up the strength to go to my English class.
We are only allowed one excused absence and every class we miss after that results in a 5% dock of our final grade. To make matters worse, we have pop quizzes every other class that we cannot make up. This may sound like a personal rant, but if you talk to other English majors here at Davis, you’ll learn that these experiences are quite common.
College courses shouldn’t have attendance policies. Unlike in high school, most of us attend class because we want to. However, if someone decides that getting eight hours of sleep is more important than sitting through an early morning class, then it is safe to say they won’t do very well. Don’t punish those who actually put in the effort to make it to class. Life happens, and life is going to happen more than one or twice over the quarter.
In my opinion, pop quizzes are useless. I take English courses to think critically about particular pieces of literature, not to recall every minute detail of a 500 page novel. I am one of those students who actually spends a lot of time on assigned readings. I don’t use SparkNotes like some of my peers. Yet, somehow SparkNotes users receive a better grade than me on quizzes. Clearly, quizzes do not accurately reflect who has done the reading and who hasn’t.
If professors want to test our knowledge of the reading material in a way that is much more meaningful, I think they should give students a few minutes to free write about it. This type of quiz would make SparkNotes users tremble and also reward those who actually did the reading.