Is it common for North American universities to take attendance? Seems like a whole lot of effort to gain little and infantilize your students. They're paying tuition, and if they don't show up to class they get punished by not learning enough and subsequently failing their exams/assessments. And if they don't fail their exams/assessments then clearly mandating lecture attendance for them wasn't necessary anyway.

I was punished by getting into grad school, going to the "meet the faculty" party, and having my Algorithms professor greet me with "oh, you're the one who never came to class". (I can't resist pointing out, now that it's safe, that it seemed like his TA taught quite a few of his classes...)

In my experience it’s common for large intro level classes. While I personally never liked these policies, I do think it’s beneficial to the average student to incentivize attendance. Think 18 year olds who aren’t able to self regulate or fully understand the consequences until it’s too late. A “pick yourself up by your bootstraps” mentality just hurts the average quality of education.

I think it's worth pondering why you feel paying tuition enters the assessment of the situation. The justification would seem to stand on its own either way, right? Or would your opinion change if tuition was free?

If you require attendance to graduate, then your degree signals conformity and grit, and thus has some value to show to employers who care about those stats but can't really measure them any other way.

> if they don't show up to class they get punished by not learning enough and subsequently failing their exams/assessments

My (UK) University was very clear that attendance was not mandatory, but if you weren't attending lectures you were not going to get any extra help from the lecturers etc

I don't think that's an unreasonable position to take, but it's nice if you _know_ rather than _guess_ who bothered to make it in to class.

You misunderstand. The customer is the government, which pays for student education through 'student loans'. The government is an absentee farmer who pays a farm labourer to produce a crop many years in the future. The labourer would rather take the money and plant nothing, so the absentee landlord farmer wants him to send photos of the seed being planted.

But why won't the crop grow on its own? It is strongly incentivized to live! And yet it does not. So you need to send photos of tilling the soil, planting the seed, watering, so that one day we might come there and see a harvested crop.