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Do Professors Care if you Show up to Class?
What U.C. Berkeley taught me about attendance
It would surprise you to know that most professors don’t even know if you’re showing up for class.
There is no checklist, nobody is reading out an attendance card, it’s not any kind of requirement on your part. You’re paying for it, anyhow. If you want to use the service you’re paying for, that’s ultimately up to you.
In my third year of mathematics, I was in upper division Linear Algebra with Ken Ribet. It’s normal to be taught by top notch mathematicians at Berkeley.
That class had about 100–200 students in it. It’s likely that this wasn’t the only class that Ribet taught.
It wasn’t a room. The place looked like this.
I’m fairly certain this is a picture of the exact auditorium the class was taught in. The only person that anybody recognized when absent was a student who I regarded as a genius. This student would consistently correct Ribet on his board. Ribet is a world-renowned mathematician, credited for paving the way towards Andrew Wile’s proof of Fermat’s last theorem. If this student was…
