National Taiwan University Exchange Series

① Is Our Attendance System Really Built for Learning?

The University Promenade of National Taiwan University

Ten minutes before class, I would arrive at the lecture hall, open the Info21 app on my phone, and wait for my name to be called—a routine I never thought twice about. Then I walked into a lecture hall at National Taiwan University (NTU), where no one calls the roll, and the room seemed to put a question to me: if students come to class even when no one is checking, and if professors treat that as the student’s own choice—was the system I had taken for granted ever really built for learning, or was it built for control?

Where Sitting Earns a Grade, Where It Becomes a Choice

At Kyung Hee, showing up is not a choice but a graded obligation, typically accounting for 10 to 20 percent of a student’s final mark. Most syllabi spell out the exact weighting. Attendance is logged either through an electronic code entered into the Info21 app or by the professor calling names aloud. Log in past the cut-off, and you are marked late; miss the code, and you are marked absent. A certain number of late arrivals converts into a full absence, and missing more than a third of a semester’s classes triggers an automatic F. The act of occupying a seat becomes part of the grade.

At NTU, attendance is treated as one decision among many that a student is expected to make. Professor Lin Zeyu of the Department of Data Science takes attendance in his Python Programming course only for a handful of key lectures. “Things more important than class inevitably come up in life,” Lin said during the lecture. “What you learn at university isn’t only academic content. Learning to make your own choices about everything life throws at you, and to accept the consequences, is just as much a part of a university education.”

Professor Huang Minhua of the Department of Political Science uses a sign-in sheet. Any student who makes it to class, whether on time or not, may sign—and up to three absences are not counted at all. There is no penalty for signing just before class ends. “I do it because a signature might give students at least some small reason to show up,” Huang said in the classroom. “Everyone has their own circumstances, so I completely understand when someone can’t make it or arrives late.” Her stance, in short, is one of deference to student judgement.

NTU Social Science Building, Room 102, the lecture hall for Prof. Huang's History of International Relations course 

Instead of Holding a Seat, Being Drawn Into the Work

NTU does more than simply grant students autonomy over attendance; some professors turn the act of showing up into a form of learning itself. Nathan Kyle Yeung, an exchange student in the School of Social Sciences at the University of California, Irvine, said each of his professors had a different way of pulling students into the room. “One class ran a reading test on the textbook at the start of every session,” Yeung recalled. “Another gave short quizzes every class, but low scores carried no penalty—only high scores earned bonus points.” Other courses used online quizzes accessible only through a password revealed during the lecture itself. In each case, professors were defining participation on their own terms, not as the presence of a body in a seat.

Chiba Hayato, a geography major from Hokkaido University, described a similar experience. The class that left the deepest impression on him was an Indigenous languages course he took as a visiting student at National Taiwan Normal University (NTNU). “Groups of four or five students had to submit a short presentation paper each week,” Chiba said. “You were only marked present if your name appeared on the submission.” The system had an obvious loophole—one group member could file the paper on behalf of the whole team—but getting one’s name on the document at least required exchanging ideas about the material. Participation, in other words, was structurally baked in.

NTU College of Social Science building, where the courses related to politics are taught

Professor Lin’s Python course works along similar lines. He almost never calls names, yet students who attend tend to score better on assignments. Weekly quizzes and coding tasks are set, and Lin has a habit of dropping crucial hints or walking through parts of the solution mid-lecture. Without any formal requirement, the design of the course quietly rewards those who come.

Rather than verifying that students have physically held their seats through roll calls or entry codes, professors at NTU pull them into the classroom through quizzes, discussions, and assignments—devices inseparable from the learning itself. Attendance, in this framework, is not about whether a student was there, but about what they did while they were.

Where the Difference Comes From

The mandatory attendance culture of Korean universities has deep historical and cultural roots. Lee Jung-kyu, an independent education scholar working in both Korea and Canada, argues in his book Korean Higher Education: A Confucian Perspective that the country’s educational philosophy was shaped under the powerful influence of Neo-Confucianism during the Joseon dynasty. Because higher education was founded on the Confucian goal of cultivating morally upright individuals, Lee writes, reverence for the teacher and physical diligence in the classroom came to be read as both evidence of learning and expressions of moral character. A culture that prized obedience to authority and diligent scholarly conduct, in other words, naturally cast attendance as a student’s duty.

Layered on top of this is the culture of gyoyukyeol, or “education fever,” that took hold from the late 19th century onward. Because entrance to university has long been treated in Korea not as a choice but as a prerequisite for success, Lee explains, the university has functioned less as a space for independent thought than as a gateway to advancement—and attendance has been understood as the discharge of an obligation, not as voluntary engagement with learning.

The result is that Korea’s university attendance system closely mirrors the logic of 12 years of compulsory primary and secondary schooling. The premise that showing up is required and must be recorded has been transplanted, largely intact, into the university itself.

Taiwan, however, shows that this “attendance as duty” model is not a universal feature of the Confucian cultural sphere. Like Korea, Taiwan belongs to that sphere, but the lifting of 38 years of martial law in 1987 triggered a rapid spread of demands for autonomy and free expression on university campuses. That momentum culminated in the “410 Education Reform Movement” of 1994, when 20,000 people took to the streets and pressed for a revision of the University Act. The reform devolved the government’s authority over education to individual universities, giving each institution the power to design its own educational philosophy.

These institutional shifts also transformed the way students engaged with their education. According to Taiwan’s Ministry of Education, another aim of the 1994 reforms was “to remove all the unreasonable controls and constraints imposed on education by the authoritarian government and to return to a student-centered emancipation of education.” It was a call not merely for administrative decentralisation, but for individualisation. The spirit of that reform enshrined the idea that university education should hinge on students’ own judgement and choices, rather than on unconditional obedience to a professor’s authority.

Taiwan’s classroom attendance culture is a direct extension of this history. Rather than making attendance compulsory, the system lets students decide whether to come; rather than treating physical presence as the metric, professors set their own criteria for what a student should have done during that time. Returning the learning process to the sphere of individual autonomy and responsibility has become the defining direction of the Taiwanese campus.

Back at Info21: What Really Draws Students to Class

The students themselves see it in much the same way. Those on the receiving end of these systems argue that compulsory attendance—including practices like roll call—has drifted far from the essence of learning. “University students can find themselves unable to make it to class on any given day for all sorts of reasons: transport, distance, cost,” Yeung said. “I don’t think tying physical presence to a grade is the right approach.” He added that “a plain attendance check muddies the meaning of coming to class. Instead of making students prove that they showed up, the professor should first give them a genuine reason to want to be there.”

Attendance policies exert their influence even before a course begins. “Classes that strictly require attendance become a burden from the moment you register,” Chiba said. “Language classes need continuity, so those are the exception, but for everything else I try to pick the least high-pressure option available.” How attendance is enforced, in other words, shapes not just classroom behaviour but the very act of choosing what to study.

Technology-driven attendance systems also show their limits. “Entering a numeric code is meaningless,” Chiba said flatly. A friend can simply text the number over and enter it on your behalf. Hokkaido University runs a similar online attendance system, he noted, and workarounds and cheating are rampant. The fact that students consistently find ways to game these systems suggests that internal motivation, not institutional enforcement, is what ultimately determines whether they walk into a classroom.

Cullen and Oppenheimer's Choosing to Learn: The Importance of Student Autonomy in Higher Education offers a clue. When students were given the choice of whether attendance should count toward their grade, between 73 and 95 percent chose to include it. The point isn't that students secretly want mandatory attendance—it's that, given the freedom to choose, they chose it themselves, which is a fundamentally different thing from having it imposed on them. The same study found that giving students a say over assignments and assessment improved academic performance. Autonomy, in other words, doesn't undermine responsibility; it strengthens it.

Students’ own accounts echo the findings. Chiba said he would show up to class even without any requirement to do so. “I attend because I want to learn, so I would come regardless of whether attendance was taken,” Chiba said. “Tuition in Japan works out to roughly 3,000 yen per class session, so skipping class is a serious waste.”

Taken together, these cracks in the current system raise a more fundamental question: shouldn’t universities move beyond physical control and draw on a wider range of methods to cultivate students’ own motivation to learn? “The essence of being a student is voluntary learning, and there are already plenty of tools—quizzes, assignments, exams—that can measure it,” Yeung said. “Forcing students to sit in a chair isn’t going to make them want to learn on their own.”

Substantive engagement, rather than mere attendance, may be the better alternative. “A model in which students have to read aloud or take part in an activity at the end of each class lets the professor confirm actual engagement, and gives the student a chance to review what they learned that day,” Chiba said. “It’s meaningful for both sides.”

And Yeung returns to the same point, in a different key: “Does making students scan a QR code to prove that they were in the room really mean they came to learn? Giving students a reason to be there in the first place is closer to what a professor should be doing than making them prove they showed up.”

Whether the classroom is used as a tool of management, or opened up as a stage for autonomy—the voices of two exchange students suggest the question is not one of policy alone. Only when a genuine desire to learn, not an Info21 attendance code, draws students into the lecture hall will our system be able to claim, at last, that it has achieved real learning.