Is Skipping Class A Good Idea?

by StudyMalaysia.com on March 1, 2018 | Top Stories

Do you skip classes at college or university? Let’s face it – we all skip a class or two from time to time, but what happens when you’re skipping too many classes? Is there an unwritten guide on how many classes you can skip?

Whether you’re a new university student or a returning one, once the semester begins the grind is quite the same. The juggling act between your classes, food, social life and sleep begins anew.

It’s easy to get caught up in all the activities on campus, and with little planning and poor time management, you might find yourself skipping classes to catch up on sleep or to finish an assignment for another class. Before you know it, you’ve missed at least three classes this week. Sound familiar? We thought so. Here’s a tip – skipping class is almost never a good idea; we’ll tell you why plus how to combat them.

Money, money, money

Everybody knows college and university is expensive. We’ve all seen the slightly alarmed looks on our parents’ faces when they find out how much tuition fees they need to fork out. But once the fees are paid in a lump sum at the beginning of the year, it’s quite easily forgotten. However, if you take a moment to think as if you’re paying for each class in instalments, you might not forget it so easily. For example, if you paid RM5,000 for a subject that has five classes a week for five months, it works out to be RM50 each class. That is how much money you’re throwing away each time you hit the snooze button without ever getting up. Seeing that minimum wage is RM4.80 an hour, you’d have to work at least 10 hours to make up for that one class you missed.

While it’s all well and good to realise you’re wasting away that much money per class, will it actively motivate you? Here’s something that might help. On your wall planner or whiteboard or anywhere obvious you look at daily, keep a record of how much you’ve wasted by skipping class.

Knowledge

Perhaps the most obvious of reasons – the reason you signed up for college or university in the first place (not counting the no-choice option laid out by the parental unit), is to gain knowledge. That knowledge is compromised when you skip a class. It might seem a small matter, for if you ask a classmate what you missed they would probably reply with “nothing much”. And then you’d reassure yourself that it was fine to miss that class. Wrong. After all, it’s unlikely that your lecturer stood up and said nothing the whole time. Your classmates are not your lecturers, they don’t know what’s important and what’s not. Besides, even if you copied their notes, it’s not the same. You would have missed the explanations that went with those notes, and you might’ve caught something that your classmate missed. Furthermore, they could have interpreted the meaning of the lecturer wrongly, and you might have inaccurate notes as a result. But you wouldn’t know, would you? You weren’t in class!

It is sometimes hard to pay attention if the lecturer is dreadfully boring or the materials just not interesting, but the best way to combat that is continuous note taking. By concentrating on solely on what the lecturer is saying and scrambling to note the important points down, it will help the time fly by and you’ll soon realise you’ve learnt a lot more than you thought you’d be able to. This way, you’ll have less to puzzle about when revision comes around – and it sure beats struggling to understand what your friend’s notes mean.

Time to grow up

This is the beginning of who you are going to be as an adult. Here, for the first time, all decisions and choices are yours to make. Whether you work really hard or just slack off, everything you do determines the person you will someday become. Habits you build over your time at college or university will likely follow you from here on. If you find it so easy to skip classes, will you be slacking off work too?

This is it, ladies and gentlemen. You’ve been guided all your life by your parents and guardians on what’s right and what’s not – it’s your turn to show them you can make good choices on your own. Getting yourself to class is not just about getting your attendance marked ‘present’. It’s about showing up for your own future. It’s choosing to become the kind of person you wish to be.

The unavoidable

Sometimes, even with the best intentions and time management skills, you might be unable to make a class. The best course of action would be to contact your lecturer to apologise and ask if you could meet to briefly discuss the class. It’s recommended you get the notes of your friends before you meet with your lecturer which will allow them to explain more quickly and for you to easily modify the notes if needed.

If skipping class has become a habit, it’s time to break it and make a new one. It takes 21 days to make something a habit – challenge yourself to attend every class for 21 days, and it’ll get easier from there. Give it your all and be your best self. You are, after all, setting the groundwork for the person you would one day become.

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