Table of contents
Attendance on this unit
Attendance on this unit is recorded via the University of Bristol app (Apple, Google) or the web version here - note you will need to allow the app or site to access your location. You should be able to sign in and record attendance from 10 minutes before the class starts as long as you’re in the room. Much more information is available here. If you’re having issues with the app not covered on that page, we as lecturers probably won’t be able to help much - your best bet is IT Services here.
This unit doesn’t have “attendance hurdles” - you won’t lose marks or fail the unit for missing sessions - but it’s still obviously a good idea to come to them. In order of importance:
- Everyone should come to the Tuesday live sessions.
- Everyone should work on the weekly assignments. In weeks 1-4, this means coming to the Thursday lab sessions for access to NAND boards. Even after that, it’s a good idea to start work on the assignment before the lab and then drop in on one or both sessions to continue working on them in an environment with TAs.
- Everyone who has questions about the week’s materials should consider coming to the Wednesday Q&As - it’s a great place to ask them, and while we won’t cover any (examinable) new material it’s often really helpful to hear the old material phrased in a new way.
- Office hours and drop-in sessions aren’t formally timetabled and the attendance app won’t work for them. They are not only optional, but take place in rooms that physically cannot hold 180+ people! Please do stop by if you have specific questions, that’s what they’re there for, but please don’t stop by just because feel like you should.
If you don’t register attendance for a while, the university will start checking up on you to make sure everything’s OK. If you know you’re going to be away for an extended period of time, the people to talk to are the school office here and your personal tutor - as lecturers we don’t have any involvement with the internals of the attendance system.
Visa implications
If you’re on a student visa, then the university is legally required to provide evidence to the government that you’re actually attending the course, and registering attendance at your units is one of the ways we gather that evidence. Visa law is complicated, there are exceptions to every rule, and we as lecturers are computer scientists rather than lawyers, and so we’re not allowed to make blanket statements like “[xyz] is safe”. You should verify everyrthing we say with Student Visa Services - their official page is here, their attendance monitoring sub-page is here, and their contact information is here (and includes the ability to book Zoom drop-in sessions).
That said, speaking strictly anecdotally, we as lecturers have never heard of a Bristol student losing their visa without a lengthy period of absence - not just missing a single session. As a general rule, we as an institution really don’t want our students to lose their visas and so we put a lot of effort into stopping it from happening by accident. So while ultimately you’re responsible for monitoring your own visa conditions, and you should always do due diligence, in your position we wouldn’t worry too much about e.g. a one-off glitch in the check-in app.