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This is an answer to a previous version of the question, where it was not clear that recording attendance was mandatory at the asker’s university. Therefore my answer does not cover the specific situation of the OP, but may still help others in a similar situation.

0) Allow all students in class and do not monitor attendance.

They are adults and they come to learn. As long as they do not disrupt the class they are free to come and go as they please. I do not see which purpose the monitoring of attendance serves. It sends the wrong signal and focuses students on signing the register sheet rather than on the objective of the class.

I do, however, start each class by thanking students who attend and come in time. Latecomers will miss this part.

I'll try to provide an answer in light of the fact that many answers here will come from professors who do not realize how common it is for some college institutions to have mandatory attendance-taking policies. The OP's question is this:

What is the recommended and proper behaviour towards late comers?

My answer would be: Whatever is least disruptive and takes the least time away from focus on the academic subject matter.

Attendance-taking is, historically, an act taken by custodians of young children (elementary or secondary school). As you can see from other answers, many professors are actually aghast at the idea of taking time to track attendance for adult college students -- and rightfully so! However, I understand that the OP is at an institution where attendance-taking is mandatory (possibly via a policy by the academic department, college administration, funding agency, or state government).

Most professors will (I think) agree that attendance-taking is a distraction and painful loss of time from focus on the academic subject matter that we are there to share. So -- granted your institutional parameters -- I think that you should minimize such loss of time as much as possible. Some suggested cases:

1. If it is in your power to waive attendance-taking, then do so.




2. If you must take some kind of attendance records, consider whether it is in your power to define what "attendance" means for your course. Perhaps attendance (course participation) is adjudicated by the most recent work submission, or weekly activity in an online discussion board.




3. If you must take actual attendance in-class, then find the protocol that you spend the least amount of time adjudicating (incl. time on excuses/arguments/challenges, etc.). Perhaps this is easiest via a sign-in sheet, simultaneous with a practice exercise, or at the end of class.

In this case, attendance is a requirement mandated from above. You could ask for clarification from the powers that be who set the rule. For example, you could ask ... Is attendance to be recorded at the start, middle, or end of class? In other words, you could push the decision process back up the chain from where it came.

This approach is likely best done only when you have lots of free time, you have a thick skin, and you just want to annoy your superiors.

The inference is that you have the freedom to define your approach to how you record attendance. Dissecting each of your options, I might see them this way ...

1) You record attendance at the end of class

2) You record attendance at the end of class AND ask the latecomers for excuses that you then ignore anyway

3) You record attendance at the end of class AND ask the latecomers for excuses AND try to parse the excuses based on a matrix that relies on other potentially unclear and arbitrary rules AND use an on-the-spot decision from that ruling to erase attendance

4) You record attendance at the start of class AND shut out latecomers from even entering the class which only serves to annoy the "honest latecomers", stoke your ego, and count attendance twice because the latecomers may also be shut out of the final exam

I hope that, with this analysis, you see the excess overhead and futility of using options 2-4.

Let's presume that you do not have the option to IGNORE taking attendance. Perhaps for example you are mandated to make a report that proves that you did. In this case, I suggest, with the freedom that you have to define attendance, you have two approaches.

Attendance Means You Were Here for the (Majority of the) Lecture

Record attendance at a certain point in time near start of class and then be done with it. Latecomers should be allowed a certain grace, perhaps even to the middle of class. After that grace, they can show up but they will be recorded as having been absent. Attendance then becomes a consistent message, both in what it means and in when it is recorded. You don't bother yourself with policing attendance on-the-spot, either by parsing excuses or by shutting out latecomers.

When you would do as above, figure out how you will handle students who ARE late yet will try to say "I was there by the time the attendance was recorded and you missed me." The clicker system that is oft-used in US classrooms can be great for this ... With due diligence, it should not be easily cheated. Other methods have their pros and cons. In the end, whatever you decide to handle such cases, keep it simple and consistent.

Attendance Means You Were Here by the Time the Lecture Ended

Record attendance at the end of the lecture and be done with it.

At university level students are adults. It is their choice, their life, their responsibility.

If they decide to come late and miss things this is their choice and their personal consequences. It is not the responsibility of a teacher at university level (Bachelors, Masters of Doctoral) to discipline them as schoolchildren or parents.

The only proviso is that they must not interfere with the learning opportunities of other students in the class by being disruptive. If they arrive late, they should do so discretely and give appropriate apologies if convenient.

I know many students who have family commitments (such as children's doctors appointments) or travel long distances to class and suffer the vagaries of the public transport system. It would be quite unfair and prejudicial to single them out with negative comments.

You should reflect on your attitude to student learning and teaching, and not those of your class.

While my preferred method is to just leave attendance up to the student entirely, recognizing that "things happen" and "people can learn differently", for the situation in which you must take attendance, you want a method that is painless and flexible.

One way is to require that students give you an index card with their name and date for each class. You can do this for the latecomers only, or actually for everyone. When they come in, they hand you a card. This assumes, of course, a suitable scale. I wouldn't require a card for everyone for 100 students, but for 30 it is fine.

If you want/need to make judgements about excuses, then latecomers can write their reason for lateness on the card.

In this way you don't need to interrupt the class, just collect the cards for later processing. You can also make notations on the cards as the class proceeds if you want to record in-process events of any kind.

My students typically would have cards as a matter of course for note-taking and other in-class activities, but you can provide the cards yourself.

For an especially small class, say a dozen or so, I would just carry one card for each student while I was teaching. I could easily sort the cards into those present and those not and annotate absences on the card after the class ends.

Of course, you may need to worry about people turning in cards for others, but a count will tell you if that has happened. And, of course, you must deal with "early leavers" with a different method, but if you know the name-face correspondences it isn't too hard to handle.

Mandatory attendance institutions are quite common in some parts of the world. I used to study in one.

We used to have a roll call. If you are present while your number is called out, your attendance is marked. If you are not, then it is not. Exceptions were made for some known problems like heavy rain or bus/train strikes, and people were always welcome to sit through a lecture without their attendance being marked if they wanted to. This system is prone to a lot of problems though. For example, politically well connected students were able to bully some professors into marking their attendance (yes, this happens).

The most effective system I heard implemented (not in my institution) was to take it out of the hands of the professors. One institution had some helps (or 'peons", as they are called locally) that they employed. Say a lecture starts at 1:00 pm. The helps used to run around their sections of classes at around 1:10 pm and collect all the attendance sheets. They had later started to up their tech and had fingerprint readers to mark attendance which were powered off remotely 10 minutes into every lecture.

There's (hopefully) no way to make a change after that. This system is less prone to manipulation. Few, if any, had the political clout to challenge a higher up to whom these sheets were submitted. More importantly, it keeps the relationship between the professors and their students healthy.

I will admit that most students never liked the mandatory attendance policy. But there certainly are good reasons for its existence in some countries. Those reasons are outside the scope of this answer.

Most of the answers are very tolerant. Since this is obviously a matter of preference, I always went for 4 (close the doors and nobody comes in after my lecture started).

Missing one class is not the end of the world for them. It will, however, teach them something: that time is valuable and that they must make whatever they can to be on time. Even if it means being there 15 minutes early because of an unfortunate train connection.

Being late of course happens, and the world will usually not be waiting for you. You were late for the plane, it is gone. You were late for a doctor appointment, the next patient jumped in.

This is simply life and being late is often a decision, and sometimes bad luck.

If being late means that they will get sick, die, or miss a once-in-a-life opportunity then laxism is welcome. Otherwise this is just teaching them that the world is what it is, and being on time is an asset.

Today, outside of academia, I start my meetings sharp. If someone is late then I never summarize what happened earlier in the meeting (I do not usually have, technically, the possibility to block them).

One last point to take into account is the commute between courses or meetings: people building timetables think that this is done over teleportation and do not add buffers between classes. They should not work where they work because they are simply incompetent.

I finish the meetings / courses I am in control of a few minutes early but if I stuck with one which finishes sharp and the next one starts sharp as well, I make decisions: to leave early or to be late (and possibly miss the meeting). Be nice and if your course is right behind the one of someone who has no understanding that commute time is necessary then you may start yours 5 minutes later (I did this a few times not to penalize the students because of decisions outside their control)

One last edit: I strongly believe that we should treat students as adults and leave attendance to the students. If the rules are different though, they should be enforced (for their own good - and apparently they are not such grown up adults yet)

I taught at the university level for years and disagree with most of the above. Yes, students are "adults" but the ones traipsing in 5 or 10 mins late rarely are acting like them. They disrupt the class, and more importantly miss important notes or announcements, requiring YOU to consistently do extra work. If they are adults, they can decide whether to come to class or skip it, but if they come, they shouldn't be arriving after the door closes (give a couple minutes' grace period) and they shouldn't be asking YOU to handhold them the entire semester while they figure out to set their alarm clock.

And since taking attendance is a requirement as noted by the OP's edit, his or her implementing of this will be evaluated and possibly become a part of the decision to rehire. So being lax about this or deciding to secretly not do it seems unwise.

Anyone who's fine letting kids come in late doesn't understand how distracting to the REAL adults (instructor and kids who got there on time!!!) that policy is. And while you can certainly make an exception for the good student who has a flat tire that one day, being the prof who everyone knows will let you arrive any time will be a Pandora's Box that once opened, will be hard to close.

Whatever policy you choose, make sure it's clearly in the syllabus and that you stick to it. But think about the students who CARE about your class, getting there on time, eager to learn, who have to put up with you admitting and addressing a stream of stragglers who arrive whenever they feel like it each time.

When you are a TA, you have to follow the local rules and will have little power to change them (although you have every right to discuss them with colleagues). The way to do so, and the choice to do so in a more general situation, is an important matter.

Many colleagues, and many answer above dismiss the need to bother with attendance and lateness ("as long as it does not disturb the class"), on the ground that students are adults. I very much disagree with this argument. Since this is not a popular opinion, I feel the need to give some context and justification.

First, recall that there are many many situations where rules are made for people own good, even adults - mandatory belts in cars, for example (as in France, I do not know the law in other countries). When first enforced, this kind of rule tend to be rejected as treating people as children; after a time, they often get adopted and become obvious. Did people get more adult in the meantime? No, but our behavior, and what we consider proper behavior, is shaped by what others do and what rules (explicit or implicit, legal or traditional) are in force.

Second, recall that this applies to us academics, however grown up we are. Do you think that the attitude of staff when you turn your paperwork for your next conference late past the deadline has no bearing on your behavior next time? If administrative staff simply treats this as if it where normal, don't you think you would probably miss the deadline quite often? On the contrary, if they (respectfully) mention how much more difficult it makes their job, wouldn't you be more careful? Do you think it is necessarily treating faculty as children to have rules and deadlines for paperwork? Or can you see it is (in good cases) about all of us to interact smoothly and work efficiently? We all act according to a large set of rules, and good rules are those that have a good incentive/heaviness ratio. The most permissive rules are not necessarily optimal.

Similarly, students attitude toward "going into class" will be shaped by what they see other student do, and how teachers react to what they do. Simply ignoring late students, or student that only show up every other class, will send a very clear message: that it is okay to do so. In most cases, this message is actually detrimental to their study.

Teachers should not ignore that the way they react sends a message, and they should thus choose how to react in a way that sends a message they believe is accurate and supports our goal: to have student learn. Since I believe the correct message is that showing up in class on time is an important part of studying, I try to adopt rules consistent with this message (one can feel differently about importance of showing up in class on time, but beware that a small proportion of student that can dispense from it should not hide a vast majority that cannot afford this).

The precise rule I adopt has changed over time. Lately, I have settled for the following: whenever a student shows up more than (literally) 1-2 minutes late, I ask her or him to wait outside; I finish what I was saying and let a little something to think about to the class; I go see the late student, and ask why he or she is late; I always let her or him get in, but make sure to mention being late is not a good thing; then I carry on with the course. This has I think a good balance, even in amphitheaters (first lectures I usually get a dozen late student at a time, then they mostly show up on time - or not at all).

Announce to the students that because of the requirement of the institution you have to track their time of coming, and create a journal where each latecomer writes down his name and time of coming. So the student tracks his own progress and you can simply verify that the time written is correct. After that calculate the exact percentage of a students presence, as required by the university.

In my mind punishing latecomers is a faulty practice, but for some reason your institution requires that. I assume that the reason behind this is to make students more responsible. By using the method described above you actually do your best:

1. Get the absolutely correct individual percentages of attendance.


2. Make students as much responsible for this as you ever could, because they will fixate and confirm the fact of their latecoming by their own hands.


3. At any given moment any given student is perfectly aware of his status and can project and manage his time and plan for himself/herself. You give them freedom and help (as much as possible while respecting the rules).


4. You avoid taking on the moral role you are not inclined to.

Students are adults. It is their life and their choice. In some countries they pay thousands of dollars to be there which means they do care about being there. Maybe they are late because of a doctors appointment, they have to take care of their own children, they have to take care of their parents, they can't afford to live in the same city as the university and have to commute and got stuck in traffic. It is none of your business what their reason might be. Your job is to just teach and not to be their parents and not to teach them about responsibility. If they miss too much of class they will face the consequences on the exams.
I will mention to those who commented that the faculty don't have the option to show up late, that the faculty GET PAID and IT IS THEIR JOB to show up and lecture. Being a student is not a job it is a means for getting a better job in the future. This means many of your students are probably working to put themselves through school and you better bet that they show up on time for that.

But, I need to clear this doubt for myself, when I need to start and teach a class as TA or in some other position.

So is this a hypothetical question? As in, you're not actually a TA yet?

Note: Attendance is a requirement for the course. A person with above
75% of attendance is eligible to take final exams. A person with a
percentage of attendance between 65 and 75 is required to submit a
medical certificate. A person with less than 65% of attendance is not
allowed to write the exam and has to do recourse.

In my experience as a student in the US, TAs were Teaching Assistants--they were responsible for running science labs, discussion groups, and tutoring sessions for a specific professor. The quote above makes it sound like you'd be in a similar situation. So ask your supervising professor how they want you to handle it, or ask your fellow TAs what that professor prefers.

If it's up to you, find a method for taking attendance that works for you. Assigned seats, roll call, exit tickets, retinal scanners, whatever. The last university I taught at actually implemented a custom Bluetooth-based attendance app that we were all supposed to use. Any student more than 15 meters away or not logged in at the same time as the instructors was counted absent and actually lost points. I've also seen QR codes posted by the doors that linked to Google forms.

If you're responsible for making the quizzes and exams, warn your students that a certain percentage of the questions (like 10%, nothing too high) will come purely from lecture and won't explicitly be in the textbook/posted notes. Or give some sort of incentive for perfect attendance. One school I've taught at had a limit on how many A's and B's I could award--I often awarded the higher grade to the student with the better attendance because they put forth more of an effort.

How do you feel about your fellow students when they arrive late? How do you feel about the current policies you've experienced? What seems least disruptive/most fair to you? When you start TA-ing, your feelings may change. As an instructor, my annoyance reflects the disruption the latecomer causes. I really don't care most of the time. But if I have to wait for them to catch up, or if they ask questions/interrupt me to discuss something we covered before they arrived, then I get annoyed.

Ask the one whose signature is at the end of the document. They made the rule, whatever it is, and they are responsible for it. The moral dilemmas are on their heads. If you have doubts, ask them because they are entitled to demand the rules and change the rules. Each and every strategy has their pros and cons and it was considered and decided.

After the discussion, stick to the rules you both agreed on as firm as possible. Describe the rules to the students and you can tell them you are not the author and uncover them the consequences.

Personally, I have used two strategies when taking attendance.

1. Taking attendance at a random point in the class. Usually at least 15 minutes into the class. Try to do it in a natural stopping point between topics. If this is a small enough class, call out all names and mark the attendance then. If someone was not present during this time, they will be marked absent. I find that a random point works better since if you made it fixed (say, 10 minutes after class starts), this will encourage more students to be a few minutes late.




2. Passing a sign-in sheet between the students. This will be less disruptive to the flow of the class (since you won't have to pause to take attendance). The latecomer may not look for the sheet when they come in late. They will have to wait till the end of the class to add their name. This method is prone to student manipulation since someone may mark their friend as attending even when they are absent.

This is up to you to decide. You are the teacher. Follow your compass.