Toward the end of the spring semester, students are really looking forward to starting their summer breaks. To illustrate, there are noticeably fewer students in class during the last few weeks of school.
From the beginning of each semester, students strive to improve study habits and work hard to keep up their grades. Further into the semester, one of two things happen: Students have improved their study skills and made them habits, or they are slowly trying less and less at keeping their grades up.

Also, summer vacation is near. Students want to start their vacation early, and it begins to show in their performances at school. It starts off with turning in work late or taking the day off from school to sleep in or run errands.

The reasoning often is, “It’s OK to miss class. It’s only one day. What harm can it really do to miss just one day?”

Of course, one day can easily turn into two days and so on.

With the new mandatory attendance policy, instructors can drop students from class based on their attendance, or rather their lack of it. Just a few mistakes in attendance could result in students losing credit for that class, losing the money used to pay for that class and even lose the time spent going to class and completing assignments.

Important information is often brought up in class, such as a change in a test date, different material than what was previously discussed, an instructor’s announcement of a canceled class or sometimes a pop quiz.

Missing this can negatively impact a student’s grade and put that student in jeopardy of being dropped.

With just a couple weeks of school left, students need to continue to attend class physically and mentally to keep their grades up. Just showing up and not participating in class can be just as harmful as not attending at all.

If a student still finds it hard to attend school during the last few weeks, just the reminder of the upcoming break from school should be motivation along with the satisfaction of knowing the whole past semester wasn’t a waste of time, money and effort.

Only a few more weeks, a few more classes, a few more days and then the real summer vacation can start without any worry of grades, assignments or tests.

Then, the only decision to make is what flavor ice cream to have.