You’re at University and you’re having a great time.  Your social life has never been better, plenty of late nights and sleeping it off until lunchtime.

There is so much going on that’s fun to do, so should you always attend your lectures?

The dull answer is…to be honest, yes you should. Your university will monitor your attendance to lectures and it can affect your grades.

That might not be the answer that you want to hear, but the sad fact is that you are ultimately paying for your time at university and each lecture you miss, you are still paying for it.

If you take the maximum tuition fee, which at the time of writing was £9250, and divide that by the number of weeks in an academic year.  So that works out at £225.60 per week.  So if you’re getting 12 hours of taught tuition per week, you missing a 2 hour lecture will have wasted £37.60.

You could get a fellow student to make notes for you, but they may not be quite a thorough as your notes, you might also not understand a scribble that has been made, or they might just forget to write down something that you really need to make a point in an essay later in the year.

Without the risk of sounding like a parent, 12 hours a week isn’t actually that much.  Even if you allow for travelling time to each lecture, say an hour for each one, that works out at 24 hours a week.  A week contains 168 hours so taking 24 out of that still gives you 144 hours to do other stuff, whatever that may be.

There may be time when you can’t get to a lecture for genuine reasons, illness or finding a work placement relevant to your course, but these need to be the exception rather than the rule.  If you are spending more time away from university when you should be there, then you need to look at why you are there and is it really the place or course that you want to be at.

Resitting an extra year is going to give you higher course fees, more student loans to pay back, and put you back a year to graduate.