Reasons for Frequent Absence of Students from Lectures: Subjective Statements

The paper presents a survey concerning the reasons of university students for their absence from lectures. The absence is operationalized as frequent, not absolute (i.e. students attending the lectures “sometimes” or “very seldom”). The aim of the paper is to identify the proportion of full-time study programme students frequently absent from lectures and to describe and quantify the reasons for their absence. The questionnaire survey was carried out at a particular university in the Czech Republic in the academic year 2010-2011. A total of 576 respondents of the first and the third years of bachelor study programmes were surveyed. Our findings show that 43 percent of the students attended the lectures in the categories “sometimes” or “very seldom”. The most frequent reasons for their absence were: (1) job, employment, (2) inconvenient time of lectures, (3) lack of time, (4) useless lectures. Especially a preference of having a job while studying, even though they were full-time students, is a surprising finding.