What systems are most effective for monitoring student attendance? I work in the Computing and Mathematics School at my university (UK). This year the School has adopted a fairly aggressive policy regarding student attendance. If a student has a poor – or zero – attendance rate, the student is contacted and a dialogue opened. This has many benefits including identifying those students who have possible  undiscovered or undeclared learning difficulties. 

If a student’s attendance rate remains poor following a first intervention, a process of issuing formal warnings commences, culminating with the withdrawal of the student if the student does not start to engage with their course.

Attendance is presently monitored at all laboratory and tutorial sessions. Attendance is not presently monitored for lectures. 

Our current system comprises a series of shared Google spreadsheets which contains the details of all students for all classes. Staff members enter attendance manually into the spreadsheet for their class.

The difficulty with this system is that there is presently no automatic link between the existing official university student record database and the attendance register spreadsheets. This means if students change groups, enrol late, withdraw, change course or units, all this information must be dealt with in a robust manner. Currently, such changes are implemented manually. This means errors are likely to be introduced into the attendance register.

I notice that there are a number of commercial attendance monitoring solutions available which are based on hardware, e.g. Telepen. I would be interested in anyone’s experience with such systems, however I don’t forsee these to be ultimately workable in my case owing to the large cost. 

I am interested in software solutions. If your institution monitors student attendance, do you use any specialist software? If so, what do you use?

Another option – a preferable one – is to work within the existing university data systems.
All the necessary information regarding student details and activities is available. The problem arises when we try to ensure our ad hoc attendance register contains up to date student information. Ideally we’d use our Virtual Learning Environment to enter attendance data. Our VLE is Moodle. Are there any Moodle users out there who use Moodle to record attendance?
My institution does not monitor student attendance. That is my job. However, we have adopted Blackboard as our Course-Management System of choice across campus, and the student roster in Blackboard is updated every day by the Registrar's Office. We additionally have access to up-to-date course rosters through our implementation of the PeopleSoft productivity software. Presumably, the Registrar's office at your institution keeps up-to-date rosters and should be willing to share them with instructors. Otherwise, what's the point of having them?

There are two methods I use to enforce / verify attendance in a large lecture course, and both require comparison of my data with the roster in Blackboard or PeopleSoft. I could write a short program to sort through both files for matches, but I would rather do it manually to help me remember students' names.


Quizzes - I give short (and simple) quizzes randomly, but at least once a week. Fully half of the points on the quizzes are for showing up and putting your name on the quiz. For this reason, quizzes cannot be made up for any reason, but I will drop three or four of the lowest quiz grades. Since the quizzes aren't hard and the quiz average counts for at least 10% of their final grade, students want to be there for the quiz. I like this method because it allows me to do random point assessments of different topics and to start associating student names with performance. The grading is not unbearable, since i write quizzes that are simple enough to be graded at a rate of 10 seconds per student.
Clickers - If you use clickers, make each student buy their own clicker (About $40 US these days). At the beginning of class, they have to register their clicker with your software, which records the clicker's ID number. If you have a list matching clicker IDs to student names, then you take attendance every day automatically. It is easy to cheat this system, since a student can also bring their friend's clicker and sign-in for their friend also.


If you want to ensure attendance, I would use JeffE's approach: 


  Isn't the most effective way to ensure attendance is to make the lectures compelling and useful?