Attendance at colleges should be optional. Not forced, not coerced and not demanded by teachers. When teachers are allowed to grade based on who attends and who skips their classes they are doing just that.

I pay taxes to support the running of public schools so I can see how grading based on attendance should be allowed for K-12 education. But at the college level, tax dollars do not fully support the students. Instead, the students are charged money for the opportunity to take classes. The decision to go to class should rest with the student because they are paying for the opportunity to pass or fail the class, and if they can pass it with out attending, then they should be allowed to do so.
Suppose you have purchased season tickets to the Seattle Seahawks, and when they start losing half-way through the season, you stop going to the games. Your seat is paid for with your own hard-earned money, you just chose not to go. When it comes time for you to buy next years season tickets though, they charge you double than last year because you didn't come for half of last season. This would be unfair to you, and so is punishing those people who pay for classes and then decide that they do not need to attend every class in order to learn the material and pass the class.

According to a study done by Pedro Martins and Ian Walker of Queen Mary University of London and University of Warwick, Princeton University respectively, shows that students can make decisions on which classes they need to attend. "Two main results emerge from the present analysis. The first suggests that there are no significant effects from class attendance." They also cautioned that these results need to be interpreted carefully because if you do not go to class at all it is highly likely that you will not pass the class. Also, they found that the students that they studied were able to "choose optimally how many classes to attend," thus showing that students are capable of choosing what classes they need to attend in order to pass.

Another way to think about this is in terms of compulsory attendance. Those that grade on the attendance are compelling you to be there for a good grade. Attendance in Washington State is compulsory only for those ages six-18 according to Washington State law. After 18 school attendance is no longer compulsorily. So if attendance is no longer compulsory then it stands to reason that any schooling after 18 is a voluntary commitment, and therefore, you should not be rewarded or punished for showing up to a class you have volunteered to be a part of. It should also be illegal.
There are some students who will never show up to class and then fail the class. This is acceptable to me. They made a choice to not go to class and to not do the work outside of class in order to get a good grade. These students deserve to fail.
Now if the federal government wants to go the way of Europe and pay for our bachelor degrees then I can justify grading based on attendance. Until that day, however, I believe and will continues to advocate that students be able to come and go from their classes as they please. As the cost of education continues to rise and as we are facing tuition increases we should be allowed to decided whether or not we want to attend the classes we are paying for.

There are a few teachers who say that attendance does not matter in their classes. They realize that we are adults and can make these distinctions on our own and I applaud them. Furthermore, I hope that EvCC will lead the way in an institution-wide policy banning grading based on attendance.