MAILING LISTS

Dianne and Larry's comments made me remember that I was going to ask
you all a question about attendance - do most of you require
attendance? How do you incorporate it into the grade? I'm curious
because I do not technically keep track of attendance (I say
'technically' because I use clickers and if someone is absent, they do
lose clicker points). I figured that if someone is absent a lot, their
teammates would account for that in their evaluations. But I have a
couple teams that I think are suffering from chronic absences, and
attendance has actually not been as high as I expected. Other than the
individual clicker points, students have no specific graded incentive
to attend (since I do not grade the majority of the team applications)
but I'm wondering if I should change that. I usually don't like to
make attendance 'mandatory' but than again, in my past courses, a
student being absent only hurt him/herself, not anyone else...

Along similar lines, how do people handle absences on the day of
evaluations? I did mid-semester evaluations yesterday and there were a
lot of students absent. Other than the fact that they will not
contribute to the evaluation of their teammates (and my guess is that
their teammates were less generous to those who were not physically
there), does anyone penalize students in some way for missing those
evaluations?

thanks,
Jennifer
****************************
Jennifer Imazeki
Department of Economics
San Diego State University
homepage: http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/~jimazeki/
Economics for Teachers blog: http://economicsforteachers.blogspot.com