Student Guide to Attendance and Engagement

Attending classes and engaging with your course is essential. Here, we explain what these terms mean, how we record your attendance, your responsibilities and our commitment to you.

Introduction

Attendance is important. One of the most important things you can do to help you to complete your course and achieve good grades is to attend classes regularly. The NTU Engagement and Attendance policy is designed to support you.

Courses are designed so that you build up your knowledge gradually through regular attendance and regular interaction with your tutors and peers. There is strong evidence that students who attend regularly and engage with the learning opportunities available do better at their studies. They are also more likely to feel that they belong to the course. Conversely, non-attendance is strongly associated with an increased risk of leaving early or achieving lower grades.

Attending classes and engaging with your course is essential.

Definitions

Attendance

Attendance describes being physically present in a timetabled class. We will usually describe attendance in percentages, for example 80% attendance means that you attended 80% of your timetabled classes.

Engagement

Engagement is a broader term. At NTU it is both a general descriptive term for taking part in a course (i.e. the student was engaged in their studies), but it also describes student engagement reported in the NTU Student Dashboard. The Dashboard takes data from seven sources: attendance, VLE log ins, log ins to VLE learning rooms, online submission, card swipes to enter buildings, using online electronic resources (such as journals) and library loans and then puts the data into an algorithm. The algorithm gives us a daily engagement rating. In 2024/25, the ratings are: ‘High’, ‘Good’, ‘Partial’, ‘Low’ and ‘Very Low’.

Class

A class means any timetabled activity. This includes lectures, seminars, fieldwork, labs, workshops etc.

Absence

Absence means that a student missed a timetabled class. You are expected to inform your course when you can’t attend and catch up on the missed class as soon as possible. Your course staff will explain what you need to do during your induction.

How we record your attendance

Attendance is usually recorded in the MyNTU app. The lecturer presents a QR code on screen which each student scans using the QR code reader in the app. If you don’t have a working smart phone, please make sure that you tell your lecturer, and they can record your attendance.

A lecturer can also record attendance using a paper register in venues without screens, but for most classroom and lecture settings, students will be expected to log their attendance on the MyNTU app. From 2025 onwards, the QR code changes every few seconds to ensure that the attendance monitoring is more accurate.

Your responsibilities

Your course has been designed so that you learn through a variety of activities: reading or watching resources, making notes, developing your skills, working with peers, tests and more formal assessments. Learning in class is often the glue that binds these other activities together.

Your rights and responsibilities are laid out in the NTU Student Charter. One of the most important statements is that every student will: “…take responsibility for managing your own learning, participate in induction and tutorials, engage in your course and all timetabled sessions …”

You are expected to attend your classes regularly (lectures, seminars, labs, workshops etc.) and participate in the learning by taking part in class activities, discussing ideas with fellow students, making notes etc.
You are expected to attend ready to learn. This may include completing pre-reading, making notes, and often, just thinking how the class fits into what you already know. You’ll also need to turn up with everything you need to take part (for example, bringing a device to make notes on, lab wear or whatever is necessary).
You must log your attendance. If you cannot do this on the MyNTU app, you must tell the lecturer during the class.
If you cannot attend, please let your course know. How you do this varies between courses but may include letting the subject administrators or your lecturers know if you can’t make a class. It is extremely important that you catch up with the class as soon as possible after the session, for example looking at any materials in NOW or watching the video capture of the lecture. You will gain more benefit if you do this as quickly as possible, certainly before the next timetabled class.

Our commitment to you

We want you to succeed. NTU’s Engagement and Attendance policy is designed to support you to do so.

If there are gaps in your engagement and attendance during term time, we have a team who will check in with you. The Contact and Engagement Support Team will try to speak to any students who are not engaging, as measured by the Student Dashboard. They will check that everything is okay and will offer help via email and telephone.

Sometimes students have gaps in their engagement and attendance because they have been ill; sometimes it can be because there are personal circumstances getting in the way. The callers will listen and help you to work out your next steps. After each call, a short note will be left in the NTU Student Dashboard.

The team will reach out to students who have no engagement with any of the following resources – attendance, VLE log ins and VLE learning room log ins, online submission, card swipes into buildings, library loans or logging in to an electronic resource such as an online journal. They will make contact as follows:

Seven days of continuous no-engagement – we will send a short nudge email to your NTU email address.
10 days (first years) or 14 days (other years) – we will send a short email to your NTU email address and attempt to call you.
20 days (first years) or 28 days (other years) – we will send a short email to your NTU email address and attempt to call you.
30 days (first years) or 42 days (other years) – we will email you at your personal email address.
40 days (first years) or 56 days (other years) – Student Support Services will write to your home address inviting you to attend a support meeting.

The purpose of all this communication is to help you deal with any problems you are facing and to help you re-engage with your studies.