Who wouldn’t want to skip a class when you’re getting free attendance?

Exactly!

This guy’s class bailed on their angry teachers after they found out about the attendance policy.

Check out the full story.

Attendance isn’t mandatory? Ok

I went to university in Germany.

A part of my curriculum were courses in sociology and philosophy.

A lot of those were marked down as “successfully attended” without getting graded.

Usually you proved attendance with a list you signed every time.

The characters:

– Angry: the two professor’s assistants who were probably forced to teach the course

– Me

– The roughly 100 other students

The teachers weren’t very fond of teaching.

The situation:

Angry had to teach a course about important figures in sociology. It was already a dry topic, but the real issue was their behavior.

When Angry talked, you could hear the hate drip from her every word. When Angry talked, it felt like getting yelled at.

We hated just being there, but we needed to complete the course.

There was a class ritual.

The first two times, like usual, the list would go round, and we wrote down our names, student id, and email.

The third time however the lecture was almost over and the list hasn’t gotten to me yet. So I raised my hand and asked about it.

Me: Excuse me, the list didn’t get around to us yet.

Angry, very annoyed at the interruption: What list?

Me: The one for attendance.

Angry: That wasn’t an attendance list. We needed your names and email to send out the assignment to complete the course.

The assignment was just a three page essay about a randomly selected sociologist. Nothing you couldn’t do with just google.

This is where it gets interesting…

Me: So, there isn’t a mandatory attendance?

Angry: No.

I think you can all see where this is going.

They made an alliance…

Malicious Compliance:

I looked at my buddies, they shrugged, and we just got up and left.

What I didn’t see coming was, how almost everyone else saw this as their cue to leave as well.

I will never forget the dumbfounded face of Angry.

Aftermath: A while later we got our assignments, finished them, and sent them in, thus successfully completing the course.

No one wanted to be in that class!

For the rest of the semester only 3-5 students still showed up so Angry had to teach a practically empty classroom that could fit around 200 people.

GEEZ!

The teachers probably only showed up because they were getting paid!

But at least none of the students got in trouble for their malicious compliance.

Let’s find out what folks on Reddit think about this story.

This person shares how no one attended their class because it was so BORING!

This person shares another experience of a boring professor.

This person shares how their class pitched in and hired themselves a note taker.

This person knows the professors didn’t want to attend either.

This person doesn’t understand the concept of mandatory attendance!

Students and teachers no longer want to attend their classes!

The education system seems to be having an attendance revolution.

If you liked that story, check out this post about a group of employees who got together and why working from home was a good financial decision.