Understanding the Academic Risk of Absenteeism

Most everyone acknowledges, or perhaps assumes, that in order to succeed in a course one must, at minimum, attend that course with some regularity. However, there is a dearth of literature that identify at what point in the semester absences become problematic, in a formative metric. The purpose of this study was to examine the extent to which cumulative absences at specific points in the semester (Weeks 4, 8, 12, and 16) affected final course outcomes at one small-to-mid-sized, private, religiously affiliated 4-year university in the Midwest United States. A quantitative non-experimental design was employed to address this aim, as well as to explain the extent to which that impact was related to the number of credits and the number of weekly class sessions per course. The two prevailing trends found were that (a) each absence accrued corresponded to a meaningful drop in the proportion of student passing the course and the mean grade point average and (b) that these patterns held true only to a given threshold