Bryan-san comments on Starting University Advice Repository - Less Wrong

12 Post author: Bryan-san 03 December 2015 11:51PM

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Comment author: Bryan-san 04 December 2015 06:37:26PM *  1 point [-]

I might agree with your rationale, but not with following the conclusion. It can be very important to attend lectures in order to hear about most likely topics that will be on tests, any possible changes in test or project details and deadlines, to keep good rapport with the professor (so you aren't one of those "students who never show up to class"), and to keep yourself focused on following the material at the rate from which you will be tested on it.

This may also vary by University and professor since some may care more about attendence and some are better than others at emailing information about test and project changes to students rather than just announcing it in class.

Comment author: Kaj_Sotala 04 December 2015 07:10:09PM 0 points [-]

This may also vary by University and professor

Probably. There have been a couple of courses where I'd probably done better on tests if I'd attended the lectures, but these have been rare exceptions. For the most part, skipping the lectures has only been beneficial, and I'm far from the only student who has found this to be the case.

I also never got the impression that most professors particularly cared about lecture attendance, if they were pure lectures. Classes that involved actual discussion are different, of course. (There's probably a correlation with the fact that in order to have useful discussion in a class, the class size can't be too large, so pure lectures tended to be mass lectures where the professors were unlikely to notice your presence or absence anyway.)

Comment author: IlyaShpitser 04 December 2015 07:47:37PM 1 point [-]

I don't care about attendance, University isn't high school, it's not a prison.