Teachers should be a little more trusting of students using sick or dying grandparents as a reason for missing school, according to Frances Woolley, associate dean in charge of academic integrity at Carleton’s Faculty of Public Affairs.
“Students don’t question professors who miss office hours because of sick children or aging parents. So why are professors so untrusting of students who claim to have a sick or dying grandparent?” she wrote in a blog post.
She said just a little number crunching can be quite revealing about something that some professors can quickly label as an excuse.
Most university students in Canada are in their early 20s, and a majority of their grandparents are therefore in their mid-to-late 60s, 70s, or 80s, according to Woolley.
Based on 2009 Canadian mortality rates, an 80-year-old grandmother has a 1.58 per cent chance of passing away in any four-month period. A grandfather of the same age has a 2.33 per cent chance, according to the data.
This means the odds of a student’s grandparents surviving the course of a semester are quite high.
However, for an entire class, the odds must be multiplied by class size.
Woolley estimated that a class of about 70 students might have up to 200 living grandparents collectively.
She found that given these statistics the chances of all 200 grandparents living for a semester is around 16 per cent.
Therefore, in large undergraduate classes, some grandparents will pass away almost every semester, according to her analysis.
“Now that I understand this, I don’t worry about students asking for extensions or deferrals because of sick or dying grandmothers. Odds are, the excuse is legitimate,” Woolley wrote.
She wrote that in a majority of cases, students indicate the loss of a grandmother as opposed to a grandfather.
She said it is a possibility that students who are lying might be trying to win sympathy from their teachers.
Another theory she said is that based on statistics, children of separated couples will remain in contact with their mother more than their father. The same may be true with their grandchildren.
Regardless, Woolley said the policy with regards to absences of this nature remains at the discretion of teachers.
In most cases students will need to provide a death certificate or obituary to prove their loss, she said.
“I think some undergraduate students don’t realize just how public and well documented deaths are. It’s far easier to verify whether or not a grandmother died than it is to know whether or not a student was genuinely too sick to complete an assignment,” Woolley wrote.
She said she conducted the research to overturn a conventional idea.
She said teachers need to be more understanding that a sick or dying grandparent is something most students will have to go through at some point.
“If there is one message I was intending to convey it was that, for the most part, the kids are alright,” she said.
