Currently, this is how Excused events/absences work as explained by a Populi Support worker (in bold):
Let's say you have 11 attendance events. A student is marked absent for 1, excused for 1, and present for 9.
Populi will completely dismiss the excused event. So instead of being 10/11, the calculation will be 9/10.
So the excused event doesn't affect the grade positively or negatively. It does reduce the total possible points, which means that if someone has an excused absence and an unexcused absence, the unexcused absence will now carry more weight.
We'd love to see a setting where the Excused event functions to same as being marked Present. This is most helpful with classes that only meet a handful of times per semester. For example, if a class meets 5 times per semester and a student is Absent 1 time, they have an 80% attendance mark (which meets our institution's set attendance policy). However, if the class meets 5 times and the student is Excused 1 time, plus is marked Absent another time, they only had 4 sessions to attend with only actually attending 3, thus their attendance percentage is now 75%, which means they fail based upon lack of attendance. This has created a challenge for classes that do not meet so often.
Thanks!
