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Mandatory Class Attendance


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There is a substantial disconnect between these two thoughts. 

 

There's a substantial difference between didactic year and clinical year. Attendance in a classroom vs attendance in the clinic/hospital. Attendance in your seat listening to a lecturer talk vs attendance in seeing/treating patients, interacting with medical professionals, etc. Missing class vs missing a grand surgery round...the list goes on. 

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Here are some random perspectives from the faculty point of view:

 

-We are trying to act in your best interests.  Your program is deeply concerned about you and wants you to succeed. We will tend to do things that in the past seemed to have ensured that students succeeded (like make them come to class). Doing so is not intended to be controlling or to get into a battle of wills with you. It is intended to help you succeed.
 

-We can generally look at a classroom and see whether a concept is understood or not. If we see puzzled looks, we can go over it again. Otherwise, the only way we will know you do not understand the materials is when you blow it on the exam. That is too late - it creates more stress for you and more work for the faculty.

 

-We like to see our students frequently. We know you are under tremendous stress. If we do not see you, we do not know how you are handling things. You might be able to manage things very well, but you probably have classmates who do not. We want to know if people are losing weight, looking disheveled, etc in case we need to intervene.

 

-It has been my experience that students sometimes make bad decisions. High performing students come to every tutorial session, low performing students never seek help. I would fear that the students who most need to come to class would be the ones who would not show. Did you know your program has to come up with an explanation for every grade below B- and report it to the ARC-PA?

 

-Students generally come into PA school with a poor ability to concentrate for any length of time. I think this is a frequent cause of boredom in a lecture. Anything past 10 minutes and students zone out. Some of this is on the lecturer, but students also have to take responsibility and ownership of their class time. There are many medical fields that will require intense, protracted conversation. You will do well to train yourself to concentrate.

 

-Pre-reading can take away a lot of the boredom. When you pre-read, you can anticipate difficult material and come up with questions to ask during the lecture. Engage a "boring" lecturer and see what happens.

 

 

If your program has a good track record, trust them. They know what you need to do to succeed. They want to make both our profession and you as an individual look great!

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My original intent was to discuss if mandatory attendance is really necessary for PA school. I don't advocate skipping every single lecture. I'm just bringing up the subject whether a student can use their discretion more on going to lectures, since PA school is a graduate level program, and we're all adults (soon to be colleagues) here...

 

I think it's also a bit ridiculous to equate 100% attendance to professionalism....We had to deal with this mandatory attendance thing from preK to high school, and I don't think it taught us to be more professional at all...

 

Missing some didactic classes in PA school for most students is to maximize time efficiency and learning ability, because there is so little time to learn a great deal of information in one year... If anything, I do agree though that the 100% attendance policy for clinical year is more of an indication of professionalism / respect, since that correlates to what is expected in the real world / on the job 

 

 

The mandatory attendance policy is sound:

 

1. It covers the lowest common denominator. It's not subjective, everyone has to be there. If we leave up it to student discretion, there will be problematic arguments over what's important to attend and what is not. You'll have students who think they can handle not being there fall behind and then have higher attrition rates or stressful periods of playing catch-up. The policy is a safety net. The sharpest and the dullest crayons have to be there, they are going to get the same didactic experience.

 

2. We don't have as big a safety net as medical students. We average 15 months in didactic, 12 in clinical, pass the PANCE and then we're out practicing. Treating patients day one. When my class saw the lax attendance of our medical school colleagues in didactic portion, their "video lectures", we were a bit envious. But they have MULTIPLE accrediting tests at various stages, and the guarantee of at least 3 years of mandatory attendance during residency. We have 1 accrediting test and no required residency. PA schools have to make sure we're graduating with a minimum fund of knowledge and skills, and making attendance mandatory has been a pretty successful way of doing such.

 

3. Mandatory attendance doesn't mean you can't ever miss. You will have sick days, emergencies pop up; we're only human. It's there so we don't take a mile from an inch. Yes, I felt like a grade schooler when I had to turn in an absence form for one missed day in an entire semester. But again, they're removing the subjectivity and making it uniform for everyone.

 

Our education is so jam-packed, so fast paced, that while we lamented some of those days where lectures were entering their 9th hour, is solidified us in a way that I don't think anything us could. This is why I don't like the idea of online PA programs, our model is pretty unique. It's the price we pay to be out and practicing medicine in ~2 years.

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  • 5 years later...
On 4/19/2016 at 1:38 PM, marktheshark89 said:

90% of our classes were not mandatory, only those involving group activity or some skills building exercise were. Most people still went to >90% of the classes, a few didnt, and they still graduated.

If I may ask, what school did you attend (+ any others who had nonmandatory attendance)?

I understand if this is too personal.

I ask because I'm a pre-PA who can learn very well independently. I easily get bored in class. When information is important, I pay attention and remember it. But powerpoints... these feel too slow. I've sped through undergrad courses and used very high quality online supplements like Khan Academy. I'd like to have the freedom to direct my own pace of learning (keeping the content, which is essential, the same, of course).

Programs don't advertise their attendance policies, so this is hard to compare for my application decision.

 

Edited by polyrhythms
clarification
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