DU students protest attendance rules, PTMs

‘We are not school-going children’, the Delhi University students criticise the new nolicies

On May 20, several student groups from Delhi University's (DU) colleges staged a protest at Gate No 3 of the Arts Faculty building against the mandatory attendance policy and the new Parent-Teacher Meeting (PTM) policy for attendance-defaulters implemented in DU-affiliated colleges.

From September 2023, DU mandated that students must have a minimum of 67% attendance to take their exams.

Earlier this month, Shaheed Bhagat Singh College announced that out of its 3,600 students, 1,397 students were found to have attendance below 40%. The college barred students who didn't meet DU's newly introduced attendance criteria.

According to Rohit Sen, a student at Shaheed Bhagat Singh College, several outstation students are unable to regularly attend classes for a variety of reasons. Some students, driven by financial need, work parttime jobs, while others prepare for government exams alongside their academic studies. While the attendance policy across DU-affiliated colleges has been made stricter post the National Education Policy (NEP) implementation, Sen says that students earlier were allowed to take their exams even with attendance as low as 40%. "Colleges, till a year ago, used to make students write formal applications explaining their reasons for falling short on meeting the attendance criteria and asked them to make up for their low attendance in the following semester, but colleges have started to singularly focus on attendance now, and the focus on teaching has faded into the background," Sen highlights. Even if a teacher has a pattern of not coming to class, students are expected to be present, he says, adding that third-year students will bear the brunt of this move, as they may be unable to apply for further studies or take entrance exams.