Skipping out of class willingly may be the ticket to a lunch date or an early weekend for some college students. For other, more responsible pupils, missing class can bring about a significant burden on one’s academic and personal lives.

An endless amount of different occasions can cause students to have to miss one or two classes or even sometimes an entire day. People get sick and oversleep, relatives pass away, cars break down, and emergencies happen.

An efficient student is one who knows not only how to successfully balance these events with schoolwork but also how to responsibly miss the most minimal amount of class possible.

Everyone has experienced having class with the students that never seem to have their act together, the ones who are always bursting into class 20 minutes late or sending out mass e-mails asking for help from fellow students.

A necessary part of being a successful student is knowing how to properly fit in to a class’ ecosystem, even when one must miss class.

Every class has its own policies regarding attendance and makeup work. Even when these rules are explicitly outlined in the syllabus, an instructor’s discretion is often employed on a student-to-student basis. Are the absences excused? Is makeup work being completed in a timely manner? Was the absence due to a school function?

A simple yet effective way to cover all the bases is to send out a concise, honest e-mail to teachers explaining the situation at hand. This action is by no means a golden ticket to decent grades, sympathy or extra time, but it is a respectful way of making the instructor aware of the situation and prepared to handle one’s grades accordingly. This procedure is especially relevant when one expects to miss several classes over an extended period of time.

If one is not at least acquainted with someone else in a class, getting copies of missed notes and handouts could pose a problem. Luckily, the new Moodle system has a feature which allows students to view a list of participants in a class along with their e-mail addresses. The list is ordered based on how recently each student has logged into that class on Moodle. A student can use this information to send out a few friendly e-mails asking for assistance to students that have recently been active and are probably keeping up with assignments.

Instructors may not always respond, and fellow students may be too busy, so these options when missing class can sometimes lead to nowhere. This is why it is crucial for a student to keep a record of which classes were missed on which dates. This makes it easy to later figure out one’s attendance grade and what kind of information was missed.

Missing class unavoidably is an unfortunate event that, if not handled correctly, could come with adverse consequences. Students can only prepare for the worst and fight through the pain to keep up with assignments and acquire the necessary information.