While philosophy is about inquiry and students should ask questions, there was a question I hoped students would not ask. That question was “do I need the book?” In some cases, this question arose from the challenge of limited finances. In other cases, it arose from a profound hope to avoid the pain of reading philosophy.

My answer was always an honest “yes.” As opposed to a dishonest “yes.” I must confess that in years gone by I heard the whispers of the Book Devil trying to tempt me to line my shelves with desk copies or, even worse, get free books to sell to the book buyers. In the before time, publishers often sent free copies to professors. Those days have passed.

But I always resisted the temptation. My will was fortified by memories from my student days of buying expensive books we never used. Even though the books for my courses were truly required and I sought the best books for the lowest costs, students still lamented my cruel practice of requiring books.

Moved by their suffering, I found a solution in technology. Since most of the great (and not-so-great) philosophers are not only dead but really, really dead, their works are usually in the public domain. This allowed me to assemble free texts for most of my classes. These were first distributed via 3.5 inch floppies (kids, ask your parents about these), then via the internet. While I could not include the latest and (allegedly) greatest contemporary philosophy, these free digital books are as good as most of the expensive offerings. The students are, I am pleased to say, happy that the books they will not read will not cost them a penny. Yes, sometimes students ask, “do I have to read the book?” I, of course, say “yes.” We smile and pretend that they will read the book.

As I make a point of telling the students on day one that the book is a free PDF file, I rarely hear “do I need to buy the book?” Now students ask, “do I have to come to class?” I must take some of the blame for this, thanks to COVID my classes are designed so all the coursework can be completed online via Canvas. Technology is thus shown, once again, to be a two-edged sword: it solved the “do I have to buy the book?” problem but helped create the “do I have to come to class problem.”

When I was first asked this, I remember feeling a bit annoyed by the question. After all, the question seems to imply that the student is thinking: “I have nothing to learn from you, but I don’t want to fail.” Honesty compels me to admit that a student might have nothing to learn from me. After all, there are arguments that philosophy is useless and presumably not worth learning. Alos, Things like logic, critical thinking and ethics could be worthless—after all, some people seem to do just fine without them. Some even manage to hold high offices and accumulate fortunes without any of these. I could also be useless in particular.

After overcoming my initial annoyance, I applied some philosophical thought to the matter. As with the “do I have to buy the book?” question, there could be a good reason for the question. Perhaps the student needs the time that would otherwise be spent in my class to do things for other classes or need the time to work to earn money to pay for school.

Out of curiosity I created an anonymous survey to see what the students would say.  28.8% of claimed work was the primary reason they missed class. 15% claimed that the fact that they could turn in work online was the reason they skipped class. 6% claimed they needed to spend time on other classes. These were the top three.

While the survey was anonymous, respondents might be inclined to select the answer that seems the most laudable reason to miss class. That said, these results are plausible. One reason is that many of my students are from low-income families and often need to work to pay for school. Another reason is that I routinely overhear students talking about their jobs and I sometimes even see students wearing their work uniforms in class.

While it might be suspected that my concern about attendance is a matter of ego, it is based on concern for my students. In addition to being curious about why students were skipping my class, I was also interested in why students failed my courses. Fortunately, I had objective data in the form of attendance records, grades, and coursework.

As would be expected, I found a correlation between missing class and failing grades when I went through a few years of classes. None of the students who failed had perfect attendance and only 27% had better than 50% attendance. This was hardly surprising: students who do not attend class miss out on the lectures, class discussion and the opportunity to ask questions. To use the obvious analogy, these students are like athletes skipping practice. But it must also be noted that there are other factors that can cause students to miss class and also do poorly, such as lack of interest and life problems.

Over the years I have tested a solution to this problem. Even before the pandemic, I created YouTube videos of one of my classes and put the links into BlackBoard.  Thanks to the Pandemic, most of my classes have “decent” videos of all the content. This allows students to view (or ignore) the videos at their convenience and skip or rewind as they desire. As might be suspected , the view counts are very low. However, some students expressed appreciation for the availability of the videos. If they can reduce the number of students who fail by even a few students each semester, then the effort will be worthwhile.

I also found that 67.7% of the students who failed did so because of failing scores on work. While this might elicit a response of “duh”, 51% of those who failed did not complete the exams, 45% did not complete the quizzes, and 42% did not complete the paper. While failing grades on the work was a major factor, simply not doing the work was a significant cause. I did find that no student who ever failed my class completed all the work and this was part of the reason for the failure. While they might have failed the work even if they had completed it, failure was assured by not making the attempt.

My initial attempt at solving the problem involved having all coursework either on Black Board or capable of being turned in via Black Board. My obvious concern with this solution was the possibility that students would cheat. While there are some awkward and expensive solutions (such as video monitoring) I decided to rely on something I had learned about the homework assigned in my courses: despite having every opportunity to cheat, student performance on out of class work was consistent with their performance on monitored in course work. It was simply a matter of designing questions and tests to make cheating unrewarding. The solution was easy: questions aimed at comprehension, a tight time limit on exams, and massive question banks to generate random exams. This approach worked for years: student grades remained very close to those from the days or proctored in-class exams and quizzes. On the plus side, there was an increase in the completion rate of the coursework. However, the increase was not as significant as I had hoped. Then AI arrived and enabled easy cheating on online quizzes and exams, thus creating a problem whose obvious solution seems to be a return to proctored in-class exams and quizzes.

To address the problem of uncompleted work, I decided to have generous deadlines. Originally, students got a month to complete the quizzes for a section. For exams 1-3 (which cover sections 1-3), students got one month after we finished a section to complete the exam. Exam 4’s deadline was at the end of the last day of classes and the final deadlines at the end of the normal final time. The paper deadlines were unchanged from the pre-online days, although now the students can turn in papers from anywhere with internet access and can do so round the clock. The main impact of this change was another increase in the completion rate of work, thus decreasing the failure rate in my classes. When COVID hit, I made the deadlines even more generous for exams and quizzes: students can complete these for full credit up until the last day of finals week. This increased the completion rates for the coursework and, I must say, removed much of the end of the semester stress arising from addressing student grade crises.

As would be suspected, there are still students who do not complete all the work and fail much of the work they do complete. But the number of failing students has been reduced dramatically, and they are still learning. But, as noted earlier, the newest challenge is AI: while cheating has always been a problem, AI has obviously turbocharged this problem.