Tutorial Attendance and Grade Achievement

It is a concern amongst academics that students, unless required, attend tutorials on an irregular basis and when they do attend do very little preparation. Tutors often find that many students simply attend the tutorial to copy down answers written by the tutor on the board. This paper examines the problem of tutorial attendance using two approaches. The first approach evaluates quantitatively whether there is a link between tutorial attendance and the grades achieved by students for assessment tasks. The second approach involves the analysis of responses made by students to a survey completed in the Spring Semester 2005. In the survey students are asked questions on how regularly they attend tutorials, on their preparation of tutorial questions and for reasons why they do not attend tutorials.