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If students can pass a class without regularly coming to lecture, then what are we actually learning from class? If a lecturer can be so easily replaced, then why not replace them?

Across Harvard’s departments, attendance requirements are making a comeback. Instead of relying on voluntary engagement, some of my professors are using verified check-ins and quizzes to track who shows up and counting that attendance when calculating final grades.

If the only thing motivating students to go to class is an attendance quiz, the problem isn’t attendance, it’s course design and teaching style. As artificial intelligence reshapes education, Harvard should be distancing itself from a rote, repeat-and-regurgitate model that reduces the humanities to checkboxes and metrics. Instead, it has doubled down on them.

Both attendance requirements and “flipped classrooms” are bandages on the festering problems of lecture-skipping and a lack of engagement. Fixing them requires a deeper pedagogical change, especially when flipped classrooms do nothing more than offer course material in various mediums.

The problems are documented. Recently, a New York Times article reported on Harvard students skipping class and being academically unmotivated. It warned that grade inflation allows this dulled ambition to continue unabated.

But when Harvard classes reward memorization, students will memorize. That’s institutional design, not student failure. If the University truly wants rigor, it should challenge us to analyze, create, and debate, not to recall facts for Canvas quizzes.

But Harvard keeps choosing image and metrics over quality time and time again. Every move is calculated, and rarely aimed at the well-being of students. When news outlets criticized Harvard students for paltry attendance, Harvard was quick to factor attendance into course grades.

On the supposed lack of engagement front, when critics lament disengaged students, Harvard’s impulse is to adopt the “active learning” flipped classroom models without the resources or training to make them meaningful. It seems the General Education department has become the launching pad for this pedagogical renovation. For example, GENED 1136: “Power and Civilization: China” has required online modules, an in-person lecture series, and a weekly seminar — academic overkill.

Consider GOV 30: “American Government: A New Perspective” class, a foundational course in the department I took last year. Students watch recorded lectures at home, read a textbook about the same topic, and then sit through class to review that material yet again — with a few minutes for questions. Then, in section, we receive the material a fourth time. This isn’t active learning. It’s pedagogical redundancy.

A well-executed flipped classroom shouldn’t repeat information, but instead present it in a new light. Popular opinion holds that attendance quizzes are a sign of rigor. That could not be farther from the truth. They’ll ask hyper-specific questions about the reading, pushing students to focus on the nit-picky details rather than the text's larger themes.

The irony is painful. We’ve long mocked the image of the disengaged professor reading slides to a half-asleep lecture hall. But in trying to fix that problem through metrics and mandates, Harvard has circled back to the same place. Students read — or don’t read — at home, then attend class to hear the same information again, an endless cycle of repetition marketed as innovation.

To solve its public relations problems with grade inflation and low-quality students, Harvard is slapping on a band-aid — simply requiring attendance and instituting other superficial metrics that mask genuine pedagogical issues.

If Harvard is going to adopt the flipped classroom, it should commit to it. Rather than just making the empty framework, they should ensure that students are met with new perspectives with each go-around, not simple repetition. Instead of quizzes, class information should be important enough to demand attendance itself.

Harvard doesn’t need more mandates to prove it’s rigorous. It needs the courage to trust its students and its faculty to be rigorous on their own.

Because if a class can’t stand without a sign-in sheet, maybe it isn’t worth showing up for in the first place.

Katie H. Martin ’28, a Crimson Editorial editor, is a joint concentrator in History and Romance Languages & Literatures in Currier House.