Showing up

Attendance at lectures and participation in crits, worth 20%. These are techniques and techniques need practice, with the absences and the silence both accounted for.

Due: 28 May 2027 · Weight: 20%

Why this is marked at all#

Because you cannot learn to catch yourself mid-spiral by reading that it is possible. Every technique in this course is a thing you do with your body in a room with other people. The ten minutes, the defusion stem, the layered analysis, the silent meal. It takes repetition at a rhythm to become available to you under pressure. A recording cannot give you that, and neither can a summary.

That is also why the course runs a lecture and a crit every week rather than alternating. Twice a week for twelve weeks is what makes a habit instead of a memory.

Classes are recorded. Recordings exist so that a week you miss is not a week you lose. They are for catching up, not for attending.

What actually gets marked#

Nine of twelve, on both halves. So three absences of each cost you nothing, you do not have to explain them, and you should not email anyone about them. Save the paperwork for something that matters. If you are past three and the reason is real, talk to the convenor. Illness, caring, a life event, a body that does not cooperate on a schedule. A mark for showing up should never be the thing that breaks a semester.

Participation does not mean talking#

This needs saying precisely, because the obvious version of a participation mark would wreck this course.

Participation here means you did the activity. You made the sandwich. You sat the ten minutes. You brought the message, thought about the decision, took your turn or passed on it. That is the whole standard.

It does not mean speaking volume. Talking more earns you nothing extra. Talking less costs you nothing. A student who passes on every single share, all semester, can score full marks on this component. The pass rule is not suspended by an assessment; it is the reason this component is defined the way it is. A course about anxiety that paid people to speak up would be marking the symptom.

The evidence, and the gap in it#

The rest of this site names a study for every claim, so this page has to survive the same test. It only half does.

Attendance genuinely predicts performance. Credé, Roch and Kieszczynka (2010, Review of Educational Research) meta-analysed the question and found attendance correlates with course grades at about ρ = .44 across 69 studies and 21,000 students, and with GPA at about .41. It out-predicted SAT scores, high-school GPA, study habits and study skills. It did so largely independently of them. As predictors of university grades go, it is one of the best there is.

That is not the same claim as “requiring attendance helps.” The same meta-analysis found the effect of mandatory attendance policies to be small, around d = .21, and based on only three studies with about 1,400 students between them. Students who turn up do better. Compelling turnout is a much weaker lever, and confusing the two is precisely the inferential slip this course spends twelve weeks teaching you to catch. We are requiring it anyway, on the argument at the top of this page rather than on that evidence, and it would be dishonest to dress the argument up as a finding.

And the critique is real. Mandatory attendance policies assume a standard body and a standard life. Students ration absences between medical appointments and rest; disability accommodations often cannot flex attendance specifically; undiagnosed students get no flexibility at all; and caring responsibilities and money fall unevenly. Melissa Nicolas has written on the ableist assumptions baked into these policies, and the empirical work on inclusive alternatives is thin.

The three-week allowance and the definition of participation above are this course’s answer to that. They are a mitigation, not a solution. If you think the trade is wrong, say so. The capstone is a legitimate place to argue that a course about mental load has no business making anything compulsory, and that argument will be marked on how well it is made, not on whether it agrees with us.