Going to class? Why bother?

I loved this piece by Jeffrey R. Young at the Chronicle of Higher Ed about whether technology makes class attendance irrelevant. I think there is a similarly interesting piece to be written from students’ point of view—their calculus about whether and when to show up, whether it makes a difference in their learning or their grades (which can be two separate things), and so on. I went to a college where the bulk of my classes were small-group seminars and language classes where the personal interaction was the thing; then again, I could not have done worse in my large Cosmic and Biological Evolution class had I never shown up.

Curse the alignment of chronology and alphabetics that place a D-minus in freshman astronomy first on an otherwise pretty good transcript.