IntroductionOpening In college some classes place more importance on attendance than others. Depending on the professor, attendance may or may not be a factor in a student’s grade. Classes who do includeattendance in their grading system usually do not allow students to miss more than a few classes without it severely impairing their grade. Others do not include attendance as participation wouldlet students decide on their own whether to attend class or not and it would not affect their grade either way. Of course, most students make sure to attend the former but not as many worry about attending the latter, even though the majority of classes in college do not have mandatory attendance. In this study, researchers used an online survey to find if there is a correlation between overall attendance and GPA. The researchers’ hypothesis is that the college students who attend both kind of classes often will have higher GPA’s than those who do not.Literature ReviewIn the article, “Class Attendance in College: A Meta-Analytic Review of the Relationship of Class Attendance with Grades and Student Characteristics,” by Marcus Crede, Sylvia G. Roch, and Urszula M. Kieszczynka (2010), the researchers checked for a correlation between GPA and attendance, like we are in this experiment, as well as individual class grades and attendance. The found a moderate correlation around .43 for both experiments. The correlation between grades and attendance was slightly higher than GPA and attendance. This study also looked into several other predictors of high achievement in college, such as high school GPA andtest scores, but even with taking those factors into account, they found that attendance still was an important part of getting good grades in college (Crede et. al 2010).
