How the attendance grade is calculated
The calculation is deliberately simple: every session contributes the value its status is worth, and those values add up.
attendance grade = sum of the value of each session's status
No weighting, no dropped lowest score, no decay. If you need those, export and do them in a spreadsheet — see Export grades.
A worked example
A group with the default policy:
| Status | Worth |
|---|---|
| Present | 1 |
| Late | 0.5 |
| Excused | 0 |
| Absent | 0 |
Ten sessions have run. Three students:
| Present | Late | Excused | Absent | Total | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ahmed | 8 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 8 + 1 = 9 |
| Sara | 7 | 0 | 2 | 1 | 7 + 0 = 7 |
| Omar | 9 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 9 |
Ahmed's two late arrivals cost him one point. Sara attended seven of ten but has two excused absences that earn nothing under this policy — worth noticing, since if her excuses were legitimate, an excused value of 0 is punishing her exactly as much as skipping would have.
The same term, excused set to 1
Change one number — excused from 0 to 1 — and the term re-scores:
| Total | |
|---|---|
| Ahmed | 9 |
| Sara | 7 + 2 = 9 |
| Omar | 9 |
Sara's approved absences now cost nothing, and all three students stand together. Which of the two tables is correct depends entirely on your policy, and that is the decision the excused value exists to record.
Lecture and tutorial totals
Where a group runs both, sessions are also totalled by category, so lecture attendance and tutorial attendance are visible separately as well as combined. A student who attends every lecture and no tutorial looks different from one who attends half of each, even where the totals match.
Absent is a real value, not a blank
A student with no record for a session is absent, and absent has a value — 0 by default, but whatever you set. This is why a session started by accident and abandoned drags the whole class down: every student picks up an absent for it. Delete or fix such a session rather than leaving it.
Where the number appears
- On a student's record, as their running total
- On the grading page, across the group
- In an export, with late and excused sessions still marked so the total is auditable