An Instagram post is being widely shared claiming that India is the only country where the students have the mandatory 75% classroom attendance rule. Let’s verify the claim made in the post.
Claim: India is the only country where students have mandatory 75% classroom attendance rule.
Fact: Educational institutions in other Asian countries like Singapore, Malaysia and South Korea also implement 75% attendance rule for their students. Also, few universities in European countries like Netherlands and Finland follow compulsory classroom attendance policies. Hence the claim made in the post is MISLEADING.
According to the UGC regulations, 2003, “The minimum number of lectures, tutorials, seminars and practicals which a student shall be required to attend for eligibility to appear at the examination shall be prescribed by the university, which ordinarily shall not be less than 75% of the total number of lectures, tutorials, seminars, practicals, and any other prescribed requirements”
We then searched whether the educational institutions in other countries implement a similar attendance rule and found that several universities and schools in Asian and European countries follow a mandatory attendance policy. According to Singapore’s Amity Global Institute website, all the full-time local students must maintain at least 75% of classroom attendance, or else the student will be barred from examinations. Meanwhile the minimum attendance requirement for international students is 90%. The same rule is followed in several other universities in Singapore. They can be seen here, here and here
The UTM school of civil engineering in Malaysia implements much stricter attendance rules where if the absence rate is more than 20%, the student is not allowed to continue the particular course and must pursue the course all over again. Similar attendance policies of Malaysian universities can be seen here and here
Also, minimum attendance should be maintained by the students to appear in exams and for the completion of the course in other Asian countries like Thailand, South Korea and Pakistan.
Universities in European countries like Netherlands, Finland direct students to maintain at least 80% classroom attendance rate. In 2016, Norwegian Government introduced a new policy to reduce the student absent rates. According to the policy, high school students in Norway who missed more than 10 percent of the hours in a given course without a medical excuse could not receive a final grade. Though this rule was dropped during pandemic, Norwegian Government is planning to re-implement it.
To sum it up, India is not the only country to have 75% mandatory classroom attendance rule. Other countries have much stricter attendance policies.
