A future without attendance certificates
It’s official: there will be no more attendance certificates at ETH Zurich. Instead, ETH Rector Sarah Springman wants to work with departments to refine instruments that motivate students to learn during the semester.
For decades, attendance certificates have been an everyday part of student life. In consultation with the Executive Board, ETH Rector Sarah Springman yesterday officially decided that ETH Zurich’s teaching will no longer use attendance certificates in future. This decision sees Springman complete a process initiated by her pre-predecessor Heidi Wunderli-Allenspach.
Evaluation of the trial phase
Can students develop successful learning strategies even without the formalities of attendance certificates? When a trial phase without attendance certificates was launched three years ago by ETH Zurich’s Executive Board at the time, it was assumed that this was indeed the case. Until then, the certificates were regarded as admission requirements for examinations and were typically awarded for class attendance or the submission of coursework.
However, the Executive Board was unsure whether students would really be responsible and disciplined enough to complete coursework during the semester without ongoing monitoring. It therefore decided to evaluate the trial carefully. The results of the three-part evaluation are now available, and they do not present a uniform picture.
Differing assessments
A survey of the university’s lecturers found that many of them still generally regard attendance certificates as an appropriate tool during the first year and throughout a bachelor’s degree. For master’s students, the teaching staff see the attendance certificates as less important. Overall, a small majority of lecturers say they are in favour of assessing learning progress in some way during the semester.
The opinions of the departments and university groups did not yield a clear answer either. Six of the 16 ETH departments had already stopped using attendance certificates before the trial phase began. Of the other ten, half were in favour of their limited reintroduction, four were against them, and the remaining departments did not reply. The Association of Students at ETH Zurich (VSETH) was in favour of getting rid of the certificates, saying that students should take on greater personal responsibility. A similar picture emerged among the non-professional teaching staff: the Academic Association of Scientific Staff (AVETH) came out against attendance certificates as an examination admission tool, but also expressed its support for other tools to boost learning success.
The statistical analysis formed the third element of the evaluation: did examination grades deteriorate? No – they varied over time, but there was no identifiable downward trend. It is conceivable that lecturers adapted their benchmark for grading but, even in the case of lectures where the teaching staff claim to have applied the same grading scale before and after attendance certificates were abandoned, the grades rise and fall over the course of the year, showing no clear pattern.
Boosting students’ motivation
So what ultimately tipped the balance in favour of not reintroducing attendance certificates? “We want to look to the future,” says ETH Rector Sarah Springman. “Instead of using attendance certificates as a form of compulsion, we are relying on students’ sense of personal responsibility and on tools that boost their intrinsic motivation.”
A good example of this is the StudyCenter in the Department of Mathematics, where students come to solve exercises and discuss problems together. The focus is on understanding the material and not – as with attendance certificates – on submitting a sheet of solutions that could just as easily have been copied out.
In particular, Springman wants to promote the so-called central elements (CEs), which highlight to students whether they have achieved their learning objectives. CEs can take the form of midterm examinations as well as individual presentations and case studies. In return, students receive a grade that forms part of the final assessment at the end of the semester – but potentially only if it contributes positively to their final grade, so that students are motivated to participate voluntarily.
“The evaluation showed that the use of central elements has proven successful,” says Springman. “However, we need to give them a clearer profile and better coordinate the way they are used.” Thus, in the coming year, the Rector wants to work with the departments to refine the CEs and regulate their use, while other instruments such as the aforementioned StudyCenters will also be promoted.
Central elements
Central elements aid performance assessment and, unlike attendance certificates, are not admission requirements. They can be graded and make up a proportion of the final grade or simply assessed on a pass/fail basis. Consequently, they can either verify the achievement of learning objectives, should this not be possible within the context of an examination (laboratory or computer-based exercises, case studies, presentations, projects), or represent one-off assessments of learning progress during the semester (mid-term examinations).