If you’ve racked up absences throughout high school, you might be wondering if and how it will affect your college applications. Will colleges see your spotty attendance record on your transcript and question your commitment to your classes? Or is it really just your grades and test scores they’re concerned with?
Fortunately, colleges don’t look at attendance records unless your absences affected your final grades. If you managed to pass your classes with good grades, the colleges you apply to won’t know or care how many days you were out.
Table of Contents
- Do Colleges Look at Attendance Records?
- Does Your Transcript Show Your Attendance Record?
- Why Don’t Colleges Request to See Attendance Records?
- What Do College Admissions Officers Care Most About?
- Do Colleges Look at Attendance Records? The Bottom Line
Do Colleges Look at Attendance Records?
College admissions are more competitive than ever. Application numbers are rising and acceptance rates are falling, not just in the Ivy League and at similarly elite colleges and universities, but at state flagship universities and even directional colleges.
Because it’s tougher to get into a good college than ever, you want to pursue every edge you can get in the application process. That means highlighting your leadership positions, your varied interests, and anything else you can find that makes your application jump out of the massive stack most colleges receive every year.
You also want to be aware of anything on your application that might hold you back or be viewed as a red flag so that you can address it preemptively. For this reason, many high school students — particularly those with an unusually large number of absences, whether for a good reason or not — wonder if colleges will be looking at their attendance records. The answer is: usually not, but it depends.
Excused Absences vs. Unexcused Absences
The only time colleges typically look at attendance records when making an admissions decision is when a student’s grades are borderline and spotty class attendance might have contributed to the student’s unimpressive academic performance.
In many cases, a poor attendance record can actually help a student in this situation — as long as they have a good excuse for why they missed so much class and thus made lower grades than they were capable of.
For example, a student who missed 50 days of school during their sophomore year while battling cancer or dealing with a tumultuous home life might be forgiven for having a lower GPA than a particular college typically accepts.
On the other hand, if a student has poor or mediocre grades due to frequent absences and doesn’t have a good excuse, the colleges they apply to may see those absences as a sign that the student is not committed to their education and may not be able to handle the rigors of college coursework.
If you’re concerned about your attendance record affecting your chances of getting into college (either for good or for bad), you can always talk to your guidance counselor or someone in the admissions office at your top choice school to get their take on the matter.
Does Your Transcript Show Your Attendance Record?
Your transcript is one of the most important documents that colleges and universities will review when deciding whether or not to let you in.
It shows the courses you took, the grades you made in those courses, your overall GPA, and, depending on your high school, possibly your class rank. (Many high schools, particularly private schools and highly competitive public schools, no longer report class rank.)
Colleges review your transcript closely. They want to verify not only that you made good grades in your classes but that you took a rigorous courseload and didn’t slack off with “easy A” type courses, whether because you wanted to puff up your GPA or because you didn’t want to have to break a sweat.
But what about your attendance record? Does it appear on your high school transcript? In most cases, no. While attendance is always tracked by schools, it is not typically included on transcripts that are sent to colleges. There are a few exceptions, however. If you’ve been placed on academic probation or have been disciplined for excessive absences, that information may be noted on your transcript.
Why Don’t Colleges Request to See Attendance Records?
There are a few reasons why colleges may not request to see attendance records. One, colleges care more about how a student performed in their classes than how many days they did or didn’t show up. Two, colleges recognize that it’s hard to tell just from looking at an attendance record whether the student had a good reason for any absences they had.
Colleges Care More About Your Grades Than Your Attendance
The main reason is that attendance records don’t necessarily reflect a student’s true academic ability. A student who has perfect attendance but gets poor grades is not necessarily a better candidate than a student who has spotty attendance but gets good grades.
The fact is that colleges want to admit as many high-stat students each year as they can. This means students with high GPAs, class ranks at the top of their high school class, and strong test scores. Today’s colleges are stat-driven because they want to rank as high as possible in publications such as U.S. News, which, love them or hate them, are hugely influential in determining the pecking order of American colleges and universities.
And the way U.S. News and similar publications rank colleges is by devising formulas based on quantifiable metrics. One of those metrics is incoming student stats. The higher the GPA and SAT/ACT average of a college’s incoming freshman class, the higher the college ranks in that category.
U.S. News doesn’t give a college any points for admitting students with perfect attendance in high school. So, when it comes down to it, it’s way more advantageous for a college to focus on your grades rather than your attendance.
Colleges Don’t Know the Reason for Your Absences
Another reason that colleges rarely focus on an applicant’s attendance record is that they understand that different students have different commitments, family obligations, and unexpected emergencies outside of the classroom.
One student might have a health condition that necessitates frequent doctor appointments during school hours, resulting in a higher-than-usual number of absences. Another student might have lost one or both parents in the middle of their high school career, requiring them to take time away from school to grieve and to reorient themselves to their new situation. Another might be dealing with parents who are abusive, neglectful, or struggling with substance abuse issues.
Because of students’ varying circumstances, college admissions counselors don’t want to penalize them for something that might be out of their control.
What Do College Admissions Officers Care Most About?
Before applying to a particular college, it’s helpful to know the factors they look at most when reviewing your application.
If you want a handy cheat sheet, most colleges and universities publish their common data sets online. In Section C of the common data set is a chart listing the various factors of a college application (e.g., high school GPA, test scores, etc.) and how important that school considers each one.
The easiest way to find a specific college or university’s common data set is simply to Google the school and then the phrase “common data set.” For instance, Googling “Stanford common data set” gives you exactly what you’re looking for in the first search result.
The most common factors that college admissions officers care about are the following:
Course Rigor
Most colleges care a ton about course rigor. They consider it important for several reasons.
One, colleges want to ensure that students they admit have been sufficiently challenged academically and are prepared for the rigors of college-level coursework.
Two, colleges use course rigor as a way to gauge a student’s readiness for college. A student who took all “senior slacker” classes, for instance, is going to have a huge wake-up call when hit with a college-level workload.
Most colleges believe that students who have challenged themselves academically and have risen to the task are more likely to be successful in college and to graduate on time.
Grades and Class Rank
Colleges care about grades and class rank when making admissions decisions. Colleges look at them in combination to gauge how competitive an applicant is.
Class rank is important to colleges because it shows how a student compared to their peers. A student’s GPA alone can be somewhat misleading and even arbitrary, as it says nothing about how difficult their classes were and how easy or hard of a grader their teachers were.
Plus, most high schools nowadays report weighted GPAs, and the formula used to weight grades can vary a ton from school to school. For instance, here in Florida where we’re located, it’s common for top students at public high schools to have weighted GPAs above 5.0. What does that even mean?
Unfortunately, many high schools no longer report class rank, which leaves colleges trying to figure out students’ academic readiness based on their grades and course rigor alone.
Test Scores
We understand that test-optional admissions policies are all the rage these days (though many schools are quietly reinstating the test score requirements they removed during Covid). Some colleges and university systems, such as the prestigious University of California system, have even gone test blind. That means they won’t even look at ACT or SAT scores if a student chooses to submit them.
But the fact remains that most colleges still care about test scores. They care mostly for one reason: the ACT and SAT are the closest things they have to a true standardized measure of a student’s abilities — that’s why they’re called standardized tests, after all.
A 4.0 GPA from one school might mean something totally different from a 4.0 GPA at another school. And finishing in the top 10% of a high school class full of slackers is nowhere near as impressive as finishing at the top of a class full of future doctors and presidents. But a college can’t always look at two applications and tell which is which.
On the other hand, a 25 on the ACT is a 25 on the ACT. It doesn’t matter whether the student took the test in Los Angeles or in the Mississippi Delta. It’s the same test, taken under largely the same conditions (assuming the proctors did their jobs and followed the procedures).
Leadership Roles and Extracurricular Activities
Colleges, particularly highly elite and selective ones, care a great deal about the leadership roles you’ve taken on and the extracurricular activities you’ve been involved in.
Leadership roles show that you’re able to take initiative and be a leader in your community. A student who’s demonstrated they’re an effective leader is more likely to get involved on campus and be more than just a face in the crowd.
Leadership experience also shows that you work well with others. This is an important quality, especially during freshman year when everyone is adjusting to dorm life.
Extracurricular activities are a good way to demonstrate your interests and passions. Colleges want students with varied interests. Try not to join only the same extracurricular clubs that everyone joins, like the National Honor Society (though if you get an invitation, that’s definitely a good one to have on your resume).
A unique activity or interest, such as beekeeping or clockmaking, can paint you as someone unique, an applicant who’ll add flavor to the student body.
Do Colleges Look at Attendance Records? The Bottom Line
Colleges care about your grades and the difficulty of the classes you took. But as long as you took tough classes and aced most of them, schools won’t know or honestly care how many times you showed up and how many times you skipped.
But if you have a spotty academic record due to excessive absences, colleges might ask for more details. The bottom line is that it’s always a good idea to attend every class you can, but life throws us all unexpected circumstances. If you’re concerned about your high school attendance record and how it might affect your college admissions, you should speak to your guidance counselor about your situation.
