Attendance Policies: The Great Threat To America

Ok so....attendance policies: Si o no? I hear that academia is the only "pure" profession left. To this I say, uh, negative. Perhaps there are institutions of higher education out there who really and truly care about educating and bettering their students to impact the world in a positive way, but there are far too many that only care about the numbers and the bling-bling - YOU know what I'm sayin' yo. :) No, but honestly, this is ridiculous. In a class today, we got polled on what we thought was an acceptable number of absenses for a MWF class. Some put 5, some put 6, I put an essay on the insanity of having attendance policies altogether. I hope that's what my professor was looking for. I wonder what would happen if someone had the brilliance to suggest that the professors make the classes a little more difficult, teach information that the students would not be able to just get from the website or book at any later date, and abolish all attendance policies. Then, the students who missed class would - gasp - FAIL the tests, and then would perhaps think better of missing classes in the future. But then the student-based faculty evaluations would be bad, because students would actually be failing, and then that might make our university look bad, thus dropping the enrollment numbers, THUS dropping the all-important CASH intake. What was I thinking. (Pearce, I'm not sad, just a little annoyed :) )