text:
Is the death of a girlfriend's father a reasonable excuse for a student to miss a class?
I just received an email from an undergrad student in a course that I am teaching.
The student informed me that his girlfriend's father passed away,
and so he will be unable to attend my class because
he "needs to stay with her to help her with official processes related to her father's death".
(I am paraphrasing what he wrote.)
This is the first time that a student has raised this as a reason for missing a class.
Question:
Is the death of a girlfriend's father a reasonable excuse for a student to miss a class?
Here's how I am thinking about it:

The death of an immediate family member is a significant event.
If the student experienced the death of an immediate family member,
there's no question to me that this would be a reasonable excuse for missing a class.
However, in this case, it's not the student
who is experiencing the death of an immediate family member, but his girlfriend.
I understand that for university students,
a girlfriend/boyfriend can be extremely important.
I don't think my university policy allows a student to miss quizzes/exams
due to the death of a relative of the student's significant other,
so I am assuming that the same policy would apply for missing classes.
However, I have a nagging feeling that if I were to deny his request,
I would be a "bad" or "unreasonable" teacher.
(Note: I mistakenly wrote "due to the death of the student's significant other" earlier but I fixed this mistake.)

Response to comments/questions

Due to COVID-19, the course is run virtually using Zoom.

A few weeks before the start of the semester,
I inherited this course from a colleague
who received reducing teaching load
because he was assigned additional administrative tasks.
I am therefore trying to run the course how he set it up in the past.
The attendance policy which he set,
and is included in the syllabus,
is that if students miss 2 or more classes,
they will automatically fail the course.

In addition, students do receive a small amount of points
for attendance and participation.

The course is conducted using a seminar course format
rather than a traditional lecture format.
For all classes except the first class,
students present their work,
and other students ask questions and give feedback and suggestions.
Due to the seminar course format,
it makes some sense to me why my colleague required
a high level of attendance to pass the course.

I found what the university policy says
regarding excused absences for exams or coursework:

A death certificate and supporting documentation where there is a demonstrably close relationship between the student and the deceased.

What I learned and what I decided to do

Ultimately I decided to excuse the student from that particular class.
It was pointed out that attendance and participation
only counts for a very small number of marks
in the overall course assessment.
Therefore, I should not waste time and effort overthinking this issue.
(In the case where the student were absent for
an exam or major course assignment,
I would have to follow official procedures
to handle the student's issue.)
It was also pointed out that students
may be strongly emotionally affected
by events that occur not only to their immediate family
or to their married spouses,
but also to their significant others or close friends/relatives
or even their pets.
Finally, it is a hassle to take attendance,
so in future courses,
it would make my life easier and less stressful
if attendance was not considered in the course assessment.

I'd like to point out that this showcases one of the many, many reasons why I dislike mandatory attendance. It's freakishly hard to draw an absolute line what is justifiably more important than going to class.

"I understand that for university students, a girlfriend/boyfriend can be extremly important." I would hope that not only for students, but for everyone the partner is extremly important. Furthermore, I would hope (as a partner) to be helped by my partner in this situation (if wished by me) and that they would take a day off to help me.

I've left the most representative comments but the rest of the conversation has been moved to chat. Please read this FAQ before posting another comment.

You edited the question a few times, but I still don't understand what you mean by "for university students, a girlfriend/boyfriend can be extremly important". Do you mean this is different for non-students? How important are/were your (ex)partners for you? If you just want to say "the partner is important for everybody, including students", please remove this sentence as it is confusing. Otherwise, please clarify.

The root of your issue seems to be your notion that relationships are not real unless they're marriage, and you can't have any sort of bond or attachement to your partner's family until someone has said "I do" at some point...

I would recommend simply get out of the business of judging these reasons. You wrote a long question, and edited it multiple times. Is this really a good use of your time? Does this level of scrutiny really serve students well?

Question: You write, "I found what the university policy says regarding excused absences for exams or coursework: 'A death certificate and supporting documentation where there is a demonstrably close relationship between the student and the deceased':, but what you quoted is a sentence fragment, likely from a bulleted list? What does it say must be done or is required for such a document? Is it sufficient, necessary, optional, something else?

You strike me as inconsiderate. "I understand that for university students, a girlfriend/boyfriend can be extremely important." Girlfriends/boyfriends are not playthings that students like to mess around with, they are real people and they, and their relatives, can become as close to the student as family. How is this any different from the death of a close relative?

Can you imagine any extra coursework which could compensate for the absence? For instance, writing an essay for the same purposes of commentary etc. served by in-person attendance.

OP, you yourself mentioned in another question that you would cancel class to help your wife with the birth of her child. Is there so much a difference in what the student wants?

Who cares? Why are you so worried about this? Mind your own freaking business, prof. Sheesh.

@user91988 This is my course, this is something my student asked me, and I do need to respond to this student, therefore it is my business, isn't it? I'm confused why you think it isn't my business...

Because you could simply say "yes, it's fine" and move on. That's the obvious thing to do. Instead, you're making it your business for no reason. You shouldn't care if your student needs to miss class.

I am happy you decided to be a human and not a beaurocrat about that. Still, I would appreciate it if you would answer my questions.

Edit: see below for some additional thoughts following OP’s revision of the question.
Let me start with this basic premise: Your students are adults.
Let me repeat that: your students are adults. That is one of the great luxuries of teaching in a higher education setting: you get to spend your time and energy actually teaching the subjects you are passionate about and not having to worry about being some kind of glorified baby-sitter or beacon of moral rectitude for your students. The division of labor is clear: the students get to make to their own decisions about how they want to best benefit from the course you are teaching, and you get to test them, give out assignments of various sorts, and give a grade at the end of the semester that reflects your assessment of what they learned.
And now for your question:

Is the death of a girlfriend's father a reasonable excuse for a student to miss a class?

While it is tempting to answer with a simple “yes”, I think the more accurate answer is that it is meaningless to speak about a “reasonable excuse”. Quite simply, in the context of a lecture-based college class, you should not be in the business of policing the reasons for students’ absences, or indeed whether they are absent or not. So in that sense, any excuse is a “reasonable” excuse. But if that’s the case, of course the notion of an excuse loses all meaning, so we come back to what I said above.
I know that what I‘m saying here flies in the face of the reality that some instructors mandate attendance in lectures, and that you do as well. Well, I have nothing more to say other than that such mandates are misguided and pointless, and lead to precisely the kind of fake dilemmas of the sort presented in your question, in which a baffled instructor tries to wrap their head around whether something is a “reasonable excuse”.
Finally, from a practical point of view, since you inherited this course from a colleague and don’t seem to personally have a strong attachment to the mandated attendance requirement, the best course of action is to simply drop that requirement, and free up your and your students’ time and energy for more productive uses.

Edit: OP has edited the question to clarify that the course is “conducted using a seminar course format rather than a traditional lecture format. For all classes except the first class, students present their work, and other students ask questions and give feedback and suggestions.”
For such a course, an attendance requirement may be logical. I’d still advocate for the instructor to make every effort possible not to get dragged into having to adjudicate questions about what is a “reasonable excuse” for missing class. It’s simply not a healthy situation for an instructor to be in and again conflicts with my “students are adults” premise. What I suggest instead is to have a policy that “students may not miss more than X lectures”, without making a distinction between “excused” and “not excused” absences, and to set X at a number that’s high enough that the policy won’t hurt students who had “serious” problems like an illness or a death in the family. For example X=4 or 5 would be pretty reasonable for a course of the type OP is describing. With such a policy, again the instructor will be treating the students as the adults that they are and freeing up everyone’s time and energy to let them do what they are actually at university to do instead of quibbling over bureaucratic nonsense.

Alas, some colleges and universities impose mandatory attendance requirements on their instructors.

@JeffE yes, alas. And we all know these are not the better schools that do that, which fact I would claim only strengthens my argument even more.

Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been moved to chat.

Completely agree with @DanRomik. In my experience mandatory attendance is also frequently used as a misguided attempt to "force students to learn" in subjects which the teacher deems difficult to test or grade (or is too lazy to do properly). Whereas the only thing which the students are forced to do is to park their behinds on some seats for given periodic intervals.

"Up to X missed lectures" avoids not only deciding what reasons are acceptable for absences, but also forcing students to reveal those reasons. For example, "my father left my pregnant mother and I must stay with her to drive to the hospital if labour starts" is certainly a reasonable excuse, but one I would not want to share with a teacher or employer.

@JeffE in my undergrad university, there are 5% grades for attendance only. So if you study fairly well and do great on an exam, you are almost certain not to get a 10/10 in it if your attendance is below 67%. Some students attend and scroll through their phones for 2 hours straight.

Re: "we all know these are not the better schools that do that"; respectfully, we do not all know that. Literally every other person in my department except myself argues the exact opposite -- that only bad schools fail to take attendance.

@DanielR.Collins sure, I meant “we [sensible people on this forum] all know that …”

Unless your university has an umbrella policy about absences, you as the instructor get to decide what you deem acceptable. In this case, I would first defer to what you wrote in the syllabus.
A common type of wording is to allow "excused" absences, where a proof of an excuse can range from things like a doctor's note, official notice from the university (commonly used for athletes), or an obituary, to name a few. If you were not explicit about absences in the syllabus, then you have even more freedom to make a judgment call here.

If the student experienced the death of an immediate family member, there's no question to me that this would be a reasonable excuse for missing a class.

What if the death was a student's guardian? How about a childhood friend? What if it was a cousin that they have not spoken to in 20 years but is still considered immediate family? Often, instructors ask that the student provide proof of the event such as by providing an obituary, which is what you could do here to avoid being an unfair instructor.

Is the death of a girlfriend's father a reasonable excuse for a student to miss a class?

Yes.

Would you also request the student to bring a proof that the daughter of the dead is OP's partner? (Good answer, plus 1.)

@user111388 I don't think that would be necessary, as I think the OP in this case should rely on their personal judgment for whether or not they believe this case is legitimate or just an excuse to get out of class. While it is possible that the student could find a random obituary and present it to the professor, I think asking to provide proof would at least discourage the student from faking this. In my experience (as the student), my explanation was taken at face value despite the policy to provide an obituary, which I appreciated since it was already a difficult time.

"Often, instructors ask that the student provide proof of the event such as by providing an obituary, which is what you could do here to avoid being an unfair instructor." When I was a student, I would have rather risked failing a class than agreeing to provide an obituary. This is a private document and out of principle I would keep it private.

@Stef This is an American point of view. Typically there are two types of obituaries: one is more of a private matter (available on cards at the funeral) and another that is public (typically available in the local newspaper and containing information for those wishing to attend). There are also others (eulogies and likewise) that are very private and more for close family. It’s my understanding that the publicly available one is the “proof.” Though I’ll echo TheoreticalMinimum that it is ridiculous to demand a grieving student provide proof of their situation to a practical stranger.

I once had 2 students make up a fake funeral service program.  I was tipped off by some inconsistencies, including a misspelling of funeral.  (This was for missing an exam, not a lecture.)

@TheoreticalMinimum, for workers in France, the death certificat is mandatory for the paid day off. But no family record book is asked. It's the same in when you miss an exam. The death certificat is mandatory to be eligible to the re-sit exam. It's nothing more that a simple scan; and you will be sending that document to almost everyone that day. So it's not offensive. Other family member will need it, bank, hospital, police, town hall, crematorium, cemetery, ambulance etc.

Yes, this should be a reasonable excuse.
Leaving aside the discussion in certain other answers about mandatory attendance policies and whether or not they're appropriate, there is an important factor that you haven't considered: University students are adults. Adults engage in romantic relationships that have traditionally been formalized with marriage. As time has passed, however, increasing numbers of young people have decided to do away with formalizing a relationship as a marriage when engaging in a serious romantic relationship that, in previous years, would have been recognized as a marriage. Indeed, in many places, the government has put into place rules governing "de facto marriages" that cause such relationships to be legally considered marriage.
As such, if I was in your position, I would assume that your student was engaged in such a relationship, and treat the death of his girlfriend's father the exact same way that you'd treat the death of his wife's father, and thereby treat it as a death in the immediate family.

And if the student changes his girl friend next week and unfortunately the new girl friend's mother passes away, are you going to say it's a reason excuse?  (assuming the student has told the truth all along). In another month, that student's third girl friend dies, what would the OP do? Keep in your mind that in many countries, a married man can only have one wife, while an unmarried man can have many girl friends at the same time. Again, assume the student is telling the truth all the time.

@scaaahu: I don't think this is an important  consideration as it is theoretically possible, but very unlikely. If you wish to go that route, it is also possible that a wife has 5 siblings and each month a new one dies. Also, a new girlfriend is probably not that close to the student and would maybe prefer somebody else to comfort her (like her best friend, mother, expartner etc.)

And, just in case there might be people around with not too much people skills: Please, do NOT tell the student @scaaahu's comment in a way like "Your attandence is mandatory because it could be that you change girlfriend next week and then the new girlfriend's mother could die and next month, you change again and then your new girlfriend could die, so I cannot make an excuse."

to echo what @user111388 do not take this route with the student it's going to feel incredibly tone deaf and might cause him to file a complaint against you or never speak to you again outside of course matters.

@user111388 You miss my point. What I am trying to say is that either the OP do not have mandatory attendance or strict attendance policy. In this case, immediate family member is a valid excuse, a girl friend is not. My previous comment was just to explain why you do not want to break that rule. I do not wish to continue this discussion. It's meaningless to me.

@user111388 instead of criticizing scaaahu’s comments, I think it’s more helpful to point out that this comment thread is a perfect illustration of the folly of attempting to codify the notion of a “reasonable excuse”. The logic of turning the instructor into the excuse police will inevitably lead to this sort of fruitless debate about the idea/seriousness of girlfriends, relatives dying every month and whatnot. Let’s not validate the logic by not allowing ourselves to get dragged into such absurd discussions in the first place.

@scaaahu If that happened, it might be time to alert the local authorities. ;)

@DanRomik: My comments were serious.First, I have seen too many absurd questions on SE to believe that no user would tell the student scaahu's comment (I am not saying scaahu would do that).Next, I don't quite understand their point and I think it can reasonably misunderstood. I don't see how from "strict attandence" it follows "no girlfriends", one can have "strict attandence" and "girlfriend's parent's death is an excuse".There is no problem with that as the situation in scaaahu's answer will never occur. People (eg students) I know would also not argue like that when OP excused the student.

@user111388 yes, scaahahu’s remarks were insensitive and it was reasonable of you to point it out. I had upvoted your comment discussing those things, but still feel this line of debate misses the point that we simply shouldn’t be discussing whether someone’s girlfriend is serious or not. It’s none of OP’s business how many girlfriends a student has or for how long. And yet the logic that instructors need to scrutinize students’ excuses for absence forces well-intentioned people like scaaaahu who are merely trying to be consistent and logical to enter into these sorts of pointless debates.

@DanRomik I must say that if multiple girlfriends of the student pass away, that's definitively not anymore a case of just checking the veracity of the claims, there are other things to worry about in that case...

I don't think my university policy allows a student to miss quizzes/exams due to the death of the student's significant other, so I am assuming that the same policy would apply for missing classes.

You'd have to check your university's policy, but I would be very surprised if this were correct. I'd urge you to double check.
What I suspect is that university policy requires you to excuse absences, for a list of specifically enumerated reasons. If the student offers a different reason, I would guess that policy neither forbids you nor requires you to excuse the absence.
Quite frankly, the policy that "if students miss 2 or more classes, they will automatically fail the course" sounds draconian to me. (And like something that might be forbidden by university policy.) I wouldn't adopt such a policy, just becase a colleague did. Personally, if I were in your shoes, I would immediately reverse course and announce a more lenient policy in its place. And in this case in particular, I would definitely accept the offered excuse.

I do not think that is so surprising: usually, deaths of family members are accepted as a valid reason to miss exams, but deaths of partners or friends are often not "officially" accepted. The reason is probably that it is not easy to prove that someone was your partner or your friend. However, we are not talking about exams here, but about missing one class, so I suspect that this is mostly the instructor's decision, and I agree with your suggestion to remove the draconian policy, or to make an exception in this case.

This was my experience: In college, after a life threatening event, I took a friend to the ER and spent the entire night with them since they didn't have any family in the area. Because I had no familial relationship, I couldn't get an 'official' excuse for classes the following day. But each of my teachers excused me individually. Not that them saying no would have changed my behavior: you can retake a class, you can't do-over not being there for someone.

As a data point, my own institution indicates (in the catalog and faculty handbook) that a student may be dropped from a class if they have three or more unexcused absences.  Not that this is not a requirement (the student may be dropped), and the word "unexcused" is a further hedge, but it is possible, under this policy, for an instructor to be draconian.

Yes, of course.
(Any discussion beyond this is over-thinking it...)

This is straight to the point, but I'm afraid it's not of much value on its own (without other detailed answers in this same thread).

@iBug I disagree, I think these other answers are definitely overthinking it. If the student needs time because his girlfriend's father (potentially someone he was close to) died, then he should get it. End of story.

I think your question is ill-posed. Why do you consider that a family member's death is justified and the death of a girlfriend's father is questionable? In some cases, we are emotionally much more attached to people who are not family members. Then, I think it is not appropriate to judge which one is "justified" or not. This is your personal judgement, we respect it but no need to impose them to others.
By the way, this could be the death of my pet. You can be deeply attached to your pet and its loss can make you sadden so much that you do not want to attend your class.
This is said in previous comments but these people are adults and unless the university has a policy which obliges students to attend classes, we should let them do what they want. Either they attend or not, this should not be our business.

I don't know if the question has been edited since you answered, but it now says that the stated reason for absence is to assist and support his girlfriend in handing formalities around the death, not any grief from the student himself. So arguments about the degree of grief the student himself will be feeling are irrelevant to the question.

I just made a remark about the first two bulletpoints.

You are actually asking 2 questions:

Is this a valid reason to miss class?
How should grades be handled?

Let's look at the questions one at a time.
Is this a valid reason to miss class?
I think it's important to see this from the students perspective. So let's get you into similar situations.
The father of your husband/wife passed away, and he/she needs you. Is it ok for you to take the day off? Or your almost adult child's best friend since they were kids pass away. Is it ok for you to stay home? What if it's your almost adult child's special someone that passes away, is it ok for you to take care of your child in this case?
According to your reasoning in the question it wouldn't be ok for you to take care of your loved ones and help them out in any way you can. To me that is ridiculous, of course you should do what is needed for your family. It's really no difference with a boyfriend/girlfriend.
How should grades be handled
This part of the question is harder to answer.
Let's take it to the extreme, different things happen during the course and the student isn't able to participate at all. Should you pass this student? Of course not, they haven't shown they have the knowledge needed to pass.
So what is the goal of the education? Is it to be in the classes? Or is it to get the knowledge of the course? Obviously it's getting the knowledge, and I think your goal should be to make sure the student have the knowledge needed rather than count the amount of missed classes.

Well, again this is a rather difficult topic to debate. What exactly do we mean by 'reasonable excuse'? Who decides what's reasonable? I'm not sure that there ever will be any definitive answer to the question of whether or not someone has good reason to miss class.
As for the death of a girlfriend's father, I think that this is definitely one of those situations in which you might be able to show some leniency and understanding. It's not surprising that a young man would want to console his girl after she has lost her father.
On the other hand, I do think that it is important to teach students the importance of responsibility and accountability. If a student chooses to skip class in order to console his girlfriend, he does so at the expense of his learning.
In this case, I think it would be perfectly reasonable to deny the student's request for an excuse and instead require him to attend class. However, if you do choose to allow the student to miss a class or two in order to take care of his girlfriend, then there is nothing wrong with that.
The topic provides much food for thought, and I appreciated the opportunity to respond. And thanks! That's one of the most interesting topics I've seen so far.
Thanks again for the great topic. I really enjoyed thinking about it.

"he does so at the expense of his learning". This is a reason to excuse him -- after the exam, he will see whether his decision of not going to class was worth it or not.

Yes
1. Students are adults
I largely agree with Dan Romik's answer, especially with emphasizing the voluntary nature of higher education.
2. The reasonableness of excuses
However, saying that any excuse is a “reasonable” excuse, while true does not seem very useful to me. Instead, I want to introduce a handy way of thinking about excuses and how we might determine how reasonable they are.
As a reference, I am using this LessWrong post, which frames the question as a two-person game in which one player (of type utilitarian) makes a rule, the other player breaks it and gives an excuse, which the first player needs to either accept or reject.
The general principle:

The general principle is that by accepting an excuse, a rule-maker is also committing themselves to accepting all equally good excuses in the future.

Which means that:

The first party's response is based not only on whether the person's excuse is believable, not even on whether the person's excuse is morally valid, but on whether the excuse can be accepted without straining the credibility of their previous pre-commitment.

Now, to apply this to the present case.
3. The Co-grieving Student
First, this is different from The Grieving Student, since in this scenario, the student has not felt the loss themselves, but rather is supporting their grieving partner (note that I don't include if the student is related to the deceased person or not, which would lead to a different discussion), which I term "co-grieving".
Second, it's still relevant that the primary grief is that of a deceased loved-one, instead of, say, grief about a lost competition, in that we would accept this primary grief as an excuse (for details see the link above).
Third, we apply the quoted principles and ask the following questions:

Does accepting the excuse encourage other students to miss class?
Does rejecting the excuse deter other students from missing class?

3.1 Note
Remember, by accepting the excuse we are essentially saying "I am the type of player to accept this kind of excuse. You can expect me to accept this kind of excuse in the future". However, society judges the loss of a family member to be of high importance, irrespective of our decision regarding the excuse. Including the partner/s of the grieving person does not drastically lower the standard.
3.2 Accept
If we accept the excuse, we cannot expect a sudden rise in people missing our classes, since it is unlikely that they will kill their partner's family members in order to miss class.
3.3 Reject
If we reject the excuse, we might deter people who's partner lost a family member from missing class. However, this is unsure, since plenty of people would regard such an event as more important than attending class (and find other ways to miss class, like finding a lax doctor). Conversely, if those people effectively are deterred from missing class in such a situation, our contribution to society is that we establish class-attendance to be of higher importance than partnership (which might not be essential to the game we are playing, but still seems worth noting).
4. Conclusion
Keeping in mind that class attendance in higher education is not terribly important, we find that under the premise that we want to ensure class attendance, it still makes sense to accept the excuse that someone's partner is grieving the loss of a family member for missing class.

This answer seems far too overwrought for this question.

The student told you: "...needs to stay with her to help her with official processes related to her father's death". This suggests that there isn't much support from the family of the girlfriend. It's then best to talk to the student to assess whether there are now other issues causing a longer term impact beyond the usual formalities. Should that be the case, you can suggest that the student get help from the university to manage the situation.
For example, it may be that the girlfriend's mother needs care and that the father was taking care of her. The mother is not able to take care of the formalities, so the girlfriend needs to do that, as well as take care of her mother temporarily before a permanent solution is found. However, she also has a job and can only get limited time off. The student is then expected to do his share. In such a situation, it's easy for the student to underestimate the impact this may have on his studies.
There is then no need for you to find out the precise details of such a situation, the student is entitled to privacy about this. But you can tell the student that in case he is now confronted with having more duties on the longer term that are likely to interfere with his studies, that he should not hesitate to seek help and not wait until problems arise.

I know this does not strictly answer the question but credit to you for 1. Actually trying to help the student by connecting him with university support services, and 2. Instead of automatically assuming the student is lying to get out of class, you do the opposite and try to prepare him for the fact it might be more than one class/day that is affected by this life event.  Thanks for defaulting to compassion instead of suspicion

All of this is U.S.-specific:  Some history on this:  A specific college (I think it was actually a truck driver's school) reported that student's were attending classes that they weren't.  This caused financial-aid (i.e. funding) issues and seemed to be unethical and possibly illegal.  (See the web-site:  https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/confessions-community-college-dean/attendance-policies)
As a result, many schools were forced to take attendance (when I went to college, they didn't typically at the University level).  So, then one has the obligation to attend lectures that had previously been basically miss-at-your-own-risk.
If I were the professor, I would typically always allow a student to attend almost any funeral, especially if it were a one-day-event.  For out of town or overseas funerals, the situation gets more complicated.
Also, in my post-academia work-world, I would think most managers would generally allow an employee to miss in this situation, though for certain jobs/situations that would not always be true.  I had to do this myself, and there was no problem from my manager.  Of course, I used a vacation-day (but with very little notice).

This claim requires citations/support. E.g., This related question was asked previously and to date no one has been able to provide a citation that attendance is actually required by U.S. federal law. Title IV language says that class participation is required in some way, of which attendance is a sufficient but not necessary condition. https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/122091/how-common-is-mandatory-attendance-taking-in-college-courses-in-us

Why does it require citations?  This isn't a research paper.  The following web-site has some information that verifies that federal policy does require attendance tracking for financial-aid purposes, it doesn't discuss the history... In any event, I put 'I think' in the above answer, admitting it was informal.  See the following web-site:  https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/confessions-community-college-dean/attendance-policies

I'll be more clear: The claim in this answer is incorrect. Physical attendance is not needed under U.S. federal law per Title IV funds. See: 668.22-l-7-i (search for "physically attending"). https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/34/668.22

Many instructors have been told this claim, so someone (other than me) had it wrong.


text:
Is it unreasonable to expect students to read the lecture notes before attending the first class?
The new semester will be starting in a few weeks,
and I will be teaching a course which starts on the first day of the semester.
The goal of the course is to teach students
how to use the R programming language to clean and analyze data.
I will teach the course using a flipped classroom format:

To save time (both my own time and students' time),
I will record video lectures and write lecture notes,
which I expect the students to watch or read before each class.
It should take the students about 1–2 hours to watch/read before class.
The class meets 1 time per week, for 3 hours at a time.
During the class time each week,
students will be in the computer lab,
where they will complete data analysis tasks on the computer.
During the class time in the lab,
students can ask me to clarify any questions they may have.

Question:
From the second class onward,
I will be expecting students
to watch the lecture videos and read the lecture notes before coming to class.
However, is it a good idea to have the same arrangement for the first class?
In other words, is it unreasonable to ask and expect students
to read the lecture notes for the first class
before coming to the first class?
My plan is to post the lecture notes online,
and to notify students that they should read the lecture notes
by making an announcement using the course LMS system.
(In my university,
students are automatically signed up to the course learning management system
when they register for the course.)
Some clarifications:

What types of students will be taking the course?
The course is a course for undergraduate students,
with most of the students are in their 2nd or 3rd year of study.
Is the course listed as a lab or as a lecture course?
The course is listed as a lecture course.
I am teaching in the business school,
where lab courses are extremely uncommon.
I believe that courses which are taught as lab courses,
say by teaching them in a computer lab,
are still listed officially as lecture courses.
Will I be giving the students too much work?
In my university, courses meet once a week, for 3 hours at a time.
My plan is to give students either some notes to read and/or videos to watch,
which they should do before class each week.
This should take about 1-2 hours of time each week,
which seems to me to be quite reasonable.
Students in my university take 5 courses a semester on average,
which is 15 hours of class time each week.

Does the university's first day of classes occur before your first class meeting?

If you're doing this before the first day how are you going to ask it?

I feel like I have had several teachers who presume we have read the appropriate chapter before the lecture, and possibly some kind of online posted notes before a first class. I have even had at least one teacher who made the papers due at the beginning of section...it is confusing. Particularly the first class because the teacher usually explains expectations in the first class I would think it is unreasonable.

"The lecture notes are quite short... 1-2 hours to read them" I'm scared for what your long lecture notes are

At my uni we had 3 or 4 courses each days. If all of them had supplied 'quite short' lecture notes, that would have set average students back up to 8 hours after classes, each day.

@DonFusili You took four classes each day? My understanding is that how it usually works is that a course has classes two or three days a week. The OP says there are 3 hours of "contact time" each week. I doubt that means that there are five classes of 36 minutes each every week.

From the second class onward, I will be expecting students to watch the lecture videos and read the lecture notes before coming to class. However, is it a good idea to have the same arrangement for the first class? Do you want them to read and watch  both the notes and the taped lectures or just the lecture notes?

You can argue about whether it's unreasonable or not, but at a certain point what matters is whether it's unrealistic or not... and I would think it is.

It's unrealistic, yes, which is perhaps not what you thought you meant, but that is what the operational question should be, in my opinion.

@Acccumulation I meant that I had 3 or 4 classes of 2 hours each day. Each course had 2-3 classes each week. Students were understood to be working "a bit more than a fulltime job's worth" of hours if they went to all classes and studied/worked on projects 1 or 2 hours each evening. Increasing this with 2 hours for each class is completely unrealistic, especially if OP is in a location where studying is not state sponsored and students are also expected to work on the side (but that's a leap in assumptions).

@alexdriedger I clarified in my question that the class only meets once a week for 3 hours at a time.

@ILiketoCode No, your class is assigned 3 hours once a week. With your scheme, your class meets once a week for 5 hours, 2 of which are just asynchronous. The fact that only 60% of the required time is officially accounted for is your main problem, not whether you can implement the scheme for one extra class.

@DonFusili I'm not entirely clear on what you're saying, but you seem to be saying that it was normal at your university to take ~10 classes, for ~30 hours a week of class time, and have ~7 hours of homework. I don't think that's normal in the US. It's generally 3-4 classes, for 12-20 hours of class. Many universities require you to get permission to take much more than 20 hours a week.

@DonFusili No, the class meets 3 hours a week. Homework is not "meeting". It's generally understood that for every hour of class time, students will be expected to spend 1-2 hours on homework, so the extra 2 hours is, in fact, officially accounted for.

@Acccumulation Your understanding of what I'm saying is correct. There's no homework culture the way it exists in the US: most courses are either purely lectures or have a practical part consisting of 1 large project per semester or even year. I understand that homework is expected and accounted for in the US: I'm reading the question as OP adding the pre-reading on top of the homework that would follow the labs. If they fully replace the homework, both my comments and my answer are void.

@DonFusili I edited my question to explain that students usually have 15 hours of class time a week. For this course I don't plan to give the students weekly homework; although the students may have a few group projects to complete on their own time.

@Acccumulation Your assumption about the class meeting time is correct. I edited my question to explain a little bit about class meeting times for typical students at my university.

While I think it's perfectly reasonable, I can tell you that it won't work anyway. During my studies I've never read most of the course descriptions. To be honest - for a long time I didn't even notice that there is a description. I just clicked the enroll button and carried on.

Is the "flipped classroom" technique widley used in your local or university?  Please can you indicate this in your question.  I am 10 years past being a student in the UK but I had never heard of it.  If I am typical of your catchment the first class might be more about explaining the new teaching technique, communicating the importance of viewing the lecture and reading the notes beforehand.  If students are not yet committed to your class, the first session is you selling it to them as well as you begging the teaching.

@TafT No, most classes are taught using a traditional lecture format. You raise a good point that students will find my request for them to read the notes before the first class to be unusual given that it is not what they have experienced in other classes.

@ILiketoCode thank you.  I suspect that will significantly impact the first session as you will need to explain to them the method and the benefits it brings to them as well as outline the expected syllabus, etc.  After the first session, I would feel it becomes more reasonable to expect the remaining students to view and read the material regularly.  I think my courses were roughly outlined as 1 part taught time to 3 parts self-study in each module (excluding assisted laboratory time), so 3 hours of taught and 3~4 hours of self a week might be acceptable depending on the institution.

Yes, it is unreasonable to ask and/or expect students to do 1-2 hours of reading work prior to coming to the first class of the semester. It’s not just that, as others point out, your expectations will surely not be met, but, equally importantly, that such a request is unfair to the students.
What’s reasonable is to expect the students to come to the first class knowing the officially advertised prerequisite material. Requiring more knowledge than that is effectively moving the goalposts, a kind of false advertising, and a (mild) abuse of your authority. In addition to most of the students ignoring your request, even the ones who do the reading may still resent you for this misrepresentation, and for trying to monopolize a part of their time that is not yours to monopolize - the time before the beginning of the class, when students may well be busy with other things they had planned to do.
At the end of the day, it’s worth remembering that it is your job to teach the material, and that the time between the start of the class and the end of the semester is precisely the time scheduled by the university for the students to learn that material. Assigning independent reading, while certainly acceptable, is something that should be done sparingly, and not before this official time period. Your intentions seem good and I sympathize with the general idea: I may also wish that if I’m teaching, say, a complex analysis class then students should read at home the basics of contour integration before the course starts so that I can cover more advanced material. But that’s my problem, not the students’.

With due respect: I do not see why it is unfair.  Your line of argument would suggest it would be unreasonable for a student to have read material of any class since, in principle, you have not yet covered this material.  What would be unreasonable would be to expect students will have mastered the material ahead of class, but prepared for it?  I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree.

@ZeroTheHero my answer (and OP’s question) concern only what is reasonable or unreasonable for the instructor to do, not what is reasonable for students to do, so I’m not sure what you mean about “your line of argument would suggest [...]”. Thanks for your feedback though.

If any students are not duly notified there will be grounds for appeal. It is as void as a shrink wrapped EULA. There is an enormous risk to students if any errors are made in your directions, and in directions that conflict with the officially published directions of the school. All sorts of legal questions then arise as to the date the coursework commenced. Once a student is acting under direction then coursework has commenced. This can have immigration, insurance, health cover, income support and employment implications.

@DanRomik most likely not the lecturer, but an international student can lose their visa if they fail too many classes - and being unexpectedly unprepared for a first lecture might be what tips the scales.

@Dan Romik: Calling this mild abuse of authority is really over the top.  At most it is expecting students to have read a simple instruction prior to the first class.

@Ben thanks for your opinion. In my humble opinion, professors need to respect the boundaries of where their authority lies. Expecting students to study before the class has started, even if motivated by good intentions, falls on the wrong side of that boundary. So yes, it is an abuse of authority - a mild one, as I said, but an abuse nonetheless.

For this course, at this institution, it might be unreasonable, but I don't think it's always unreasonable. It was the norm at my law school for professors to assign reading due on the first day of class, and at my current institution many of the capstone, upper-level methods, and traveling courses require students to do pre-course work.

Unfortunately I fail to understand how this is an "abuse of authority"? It is certainly the authority of the lecturer to decide how students should study the material. I agree that it is an unreasonable expectation, because no student would do this, unless in an elite university outside the US/UK setting; e.g. Russia or China. But there's nothing "unethical" or "illegal" about this modest request.

@Dilworth the lecturer has authority over how the students should study the material, from the time the semester has started until its end. Not in the weeks leading up to the beginning of the semester. Trying to exert control over what the students do in that period of time is where a lecturer would be exceeding, and mildly abusing, their authority. And note that I didn’t use the words “unethical” or “illegal”, so your last sentence is attacking a straw man.

@DanRomik, well, I understand what you were trying to say. I just disagree with it. Student's learning is not a formal, rigid, and legislative event, as perceived culturally in places like the US/UK. In places like East Europe, China, Russia, etc. this would be acceptable I believe, because "couple of days before the term begins" is still a completely reasonable part of the learning term, even if some legislative-culture would deem it as  "beyond the time interval in which the lecturer has authority".

Let alone that the course may start on Fri, while the term starts on Mon, so even formally it's not necessarily beyond term time.

I do wonder if this needs revisiting, post pandemic. Particularly with respect to the idea that extra reading must be used sparingly. Even before the pandemic, my university specified that a semester requires 1200 hrs of study, but only only 150hrs of in person contact.  Now many modules are now taught without much in the way of in class time.  A class might meet two or three times a semester, but still cover the same material.

@IanSudbery Indeed. I was a very diligent student and covered all material we were expected to do in class and practicals. But I would not have prepared anything before start of the course, as I was busy with other things.

@IanSudbery I stand by my opinion that readings should be assigned sparingly (pandemic or not), but there's certainly room for debate on that point. The main point of my answer, and the thing I feel much more strongly about, is that readings should not be assigned before the semester starts. As CaptainEmacs said, many students are fully committed to other things before the start of the semester (or just want to enjoy their vacation, which they are fully entitled to) and cannot reasonably be expected to do any work for the class beyond having the officially listed prerequisite knowledge.

@DanRomik I agree about work pre-semester (before the first class is different to before the semester starts in most cases). I disagree about readings being assigned sparingly. Its always been the case that in my uni (not a pandemic thing) that classes are supposed to represent less than 15% of the time a student dedicates to a course, and that students sign up to this when they join the university. This is for a science program. For humanities programs the ratio is even worse, and a 100 hour course might only have 5 or 6 in-class hours.

@DanRomik This is different again to the concept of flipped classroom, where the whole point is that diadatic learning is done entirely indepenently without any lectures, and that in person time is used to help students when they get stuck. This again, existed prior to the pandemic, but is now become far more common, to the extent that at some institutions, it is now the default way to deliver a course.

In my opinion,  yes it is unreasonable.
Disclaimer: I am a student in the Netherlands, different universities and countries might work differently.
In all the courses I've followed I can't remember a single one that expected me to prepare for the first class. Usually the first half of the first lecture of a course is dedicated to explaining how the course works, what is expected of you, and anything else related to organization. Most students, including myself, usually don't even register in the online environment where the teaching material is posted before the first lecture.
You could argue that maybe this shouldn't be the case, and that students should be more diligent. And naturally, it is up to you whether you want to take this view and potentially punish students who didn't prepare. Practically though, most students are probably just going to miss it, or skip it.
If you do decide to have students prepare for the first lecture, make sure to clearly note this in the course guide/emails/online announcements. And also note the potential consequences for students who do not prepare.

Nothing in your answer tells me why it would be unreasonable to ask students to be prepared for the first class. Yes, students may not be used to it, it clearly requires communication, and it may practically not be the best idea didactically speaking, but nothing about this is unreasonable.

@xLeitix, if a single course has stricter requirements about things that should be done beforehand, and there's no practical way for the usual student to even find out about those requirements before it's too late, then yes, it really quickly starts getting unreasonable.

The one exception in my experience has been set up (ex: signing up for Github, installing IDEs, etc.) . However, these were not mandatory to be done before the first class but recommended to save you time later

@xLeitix what makes it unreasonable is your highly nonstandard definition of what it means to “be prepared for the first class”. I’ve never seen a university where it is expected that students should have read the material for a lecture before attending the lecture. Students go to lectures to learn new material, not to be reminded of things they already learned at home. The only possible exception to this rule is the flipped classroom format, but even then it is inappropriate to have such expectations before the class has even started.

It is a different story on our country. Most of the time, specially in college, the professors are expecting the students to be familiar or at least read some parts of the lesson before it will be discussed. Worst case scenario will be a quiz before starting the class. I've witnessed that it hurts some of the students' grades badly specially for some who doesn't have enough time to study outside of school since it is consumed by school hours and what's left is for personal/family and homework. In my opinion, it is unreasonable if it'll affect your grades and performance at school.

I'd say not unreasonable but yes quite painful and unexpected so...

@DanRomik Interesting. As someone who studied at university in Scandinavia, I’ve never had a class where students weren’t expected to have read the material before a lecture, just like it was all through elementary and high school. You read the material on your own before class, then in class you get a summary and discussion of the most salient parts of that material with perspectives to other relevant material. If you weren’t supposed to read the material beforehand, are you essentially saying you’ve never had a class you were supposed to prepare for?

@JanusBahsJacquet I too am Scandinavian. Before university I was never asked to prepare for a class. At university we were often recommended to read some material before class, but I only encountered one in which it was actually expected. For the remainder it was more a case of "lectures are a good introduction of the material, and the material exists for you to study in case you don't already get it". It may be more a matter of subjects, specific institutions, and individual teachers or learners, rather than broad geographical differences.

@JacobRaihle Yes, probably it is. I studied within the humanities, and it generally does not make sense in, say, a literature class to have a lecture on the interpretation of some work or other if none of the students have read the work. That said, I did do half a degree in a technical university as well, and even in the programming classes I took there, we were expected to be familiar with the concepts discussed in lectures, which meant reading the chapters on those concepts in the designated curriculum.

@JanusBahsJacquet no, I never said such a thing. I don’t know what it means to “prepare” for a class - this can mean lots of different things to different people. I am saying that I’ve never had a class where it was expected that students study the content of the lecture in advance of the lecture, nothing more or less.

I think that it is reasonable to ask that they read the notes. But I suspect that you will get about the same response that you would get to any similar request during the term. Some will do it - most likely those who need it least - and others won't. There are a lot of reasons beyond slacking why they won't. They have other commitments for their time and effort between terms.
So, my advice would be to make the request, but don't assume that it is honored. Find a way in class that you can proceed without disadvantaging some of the students. One way is to start out with pairing in the first exercises. One member of a pair might be able to bring her/his partner up to speed. Another way is to spend part of the first class discussing the notes explicitly. If the scale is reasonable, make this an interactive exercise.
Another way is to provide an ungraded quiz that you use solely to let the students know if they have any gaps that they should fill quickly. Make it clear that if they do well on the quiz they are prepared to continue, but otherwise they need to quickly bring themselves up to speed - via the notes.
Actually, maybe the response would be a bit less than normal, given that this is, to them, an unusual request.
If you are a relatively new teacher, I'll note that your students are not like you, unless this is an advanced graduate course. Very few of them, anyway. You are who and where you are because of certain characteristics and habits that the vast majority of your students don't share. It is always a good idea to remember that. You are not teaching people just like you. They probably don't learn in the same way that you learn. Explore Learning Modalities for a discussion of that. You have succeeded. They haven't (yet). Moreover their success won't be like yours for the most part.

Disadvantaging is fine, so long as it's not to the point of being irrecoverable (For example, if students do not understand the first lecture because they aren't prepared, they still can study and learn the material themselves to catch up).  Setting the precedent of rehashing the assigned reading during the first class, when the intention is not to do so throughout the whole semester, sounds a lot more problematic, because students will assume this will continue.

@BenVoigt, easy enough to clear up any misunderstanding or misplaced assumptions. Also, asking about questions on readings may be a good practice in many situations. But yes, irrecoverable should be avoided. Minor annoyances shouldn't figure in to the calculation.

+1 for the answer, especially this comment: "You are who and where you are because of certain characteristics and habits that the vast majority of your students don't share. It is always a good idea to remember that."

You want the students to read the lecture notes prior to the first meeting of the class, but you do not appear to have a method of communicating this requirement directly to the students. Without a way to ensure that your announcement is read by all of the students in the class you cannot assume that any of them will read it, and thus in my opinion your requirement to spend multiple hours preparing for the class prior to the first meeting is unreasonable.

The OP said the school uses an LMS, which probably means it's possible to send out an emai directly to each registered student. The problem, as pointed out in another answer, is that some students may not have registered by the first class.

@ElizabethHenning Even if they have, they might be on holidays, summer work camp, who knows until the semester starts and either not receive the mail in time or not have the time to get hold of the lecture notes and read them / make notes etc.

Not all your students might have fully enrolled by the first class. They might not have access to the course announcements or the lecture notes, and therefore they can't read the material even if they want to.
Beyond that though, what someone considers reasonable and unreasonable will vary from person to person, so I'll sidestep that discussion (the comments to one answer already quotes from dictionaries what this word means) and say, chances are:

Most students will not read the lecture notes before the first class. Only the most dedicated and diligent of students will.
Most students will not complain if you make this request. Some won't even be aware of it until the first lecture.
If you go ahead with this and stick to your guns, the most common reaction will probably be surprise. "Wow, this course / professor is not easy".

Personally, I'd skip the requirements in the first class and impose them beginning in the second class. That way, everyone (those that come to the labs anyway) will know what you expect of them, and ignorance is no longer an excuse.

This is actually a form of blended learning called the flipped classroom. This approach involves studying the material before classes and using the class period for activities and assignments to better understand the content. As such, this is not an unusual request.
The only thing that makes this unreasonable is the timing. If I understand the question correctly, you are trying to have the students read lecture notes before you even met them. Before the very first class is strange in my opinion. However, if you have a prior relationship with these students and have taught them before it may be more reasonable but still unusual. Often the first class is used to explain expectations for the semester and not so much on learning activities.

+1, but note that the regular extra reading between classes needs to be counted by the "system" towards the amount of academic credit for the course.

@einpoklum no, there is not extra reading, reading outside of class should be the expectation of any class.  What happens with flipped is that the time previously spent listening to lecture is now put in outside of class and the time doing problems, some kinds of writing, etc that used to be done outside of class is now done during class time. That's what flipped means.

@Elin: Reading outside of class (call it "preparatory reading") is one thing - which should also be accounted for beyond a certain volume; reading lecture notes in addition to attending lectures is another thing.

@einpoklum In a "flipped" environment the time spent in the classroom is generally not time spend listening to lecture: it is spent on activities in which the skills and information int he reading (or videos or whatever) is applied and placed in context. You ask the student to do more factual learning out of class, but less simple drill and practice out of class (i.e. the traditional "homework" is moved into the supervised environment). Or that is the theory. My applications generally ended  with me doing some "review" at the beginning of each class before getting down to the applications.

@dmckee: IIANM, the question regards a regular (i.e. non-"flipped") environment. In a "flipped" environment, the classroom activities you describe would probably not be called "lectures". Regardless of which environment it is, the credits should be counted based on all activity types and a reasonable estimate of the time they involve.

Everyone is focusing on the fact that you want to have this done before the first class and casually glances over the fact that you are effectively doubling the amount of time necessary for your class.
You don't mention a location, but at every college I know of, course credit values are assigned depending on a loose estimation of the expected number of hours a student puts in before voluntary extra work. The way you want to structure this, the credit score would have to be doubled.
If the credit score isn't doubled, you should either halve the number of classes or abandon the idea of not actually teaching the lecture altogether.
In order to make this an answer to the question as posed: I second all answers that point out that you have no reliable channel to make your expectations known to the students. As such the specific expectation as asked is unreasonable.

Expectations regarding the student's time tend to be optimistic. We once calculated that, after doing all assigned reading, preparations, exercises etc., we'd be able to sleep for 8 hours - per week.

We don't know how the OPs system works. In our university a 10 credit module is expected to involve 100 hours of work, but even the most intensive 10 credit modules only have 18 hrs of class time. You are expected to do at least 5 times as much work outside class as in.

You don't say what level of students or what any prerequisites are for the course, so my comments are based on the idea of a fairly low level undergraduate course. If it were an honors course for senior majors I might answer differently.
1-2 hours is way too much to expect before the first meeting. At least in the US, students may not   even complete registration before the first class and some may not be back to campus until the day of your class meeting.
Also you are using the term lab notes and lecture notes interchangeably, but they are not the same. Are you talking about lab instructions? Or were you planning to lecture for two hours?  At most, you might ask them to "skim" instructions but don't count on them doing it.
That said, I do often email students before the first meeting and ask that they do something. For example, send me an email introducing themselves, post a self introduction on a discussion board, complete a short survey or pretest assessment, read a related newspaper article or watch a related video (since you mention data analysis I'll say that for my into stats class I sometimes use one of the Gapminder videos).  Or  make sure they know how to login to some system. Also remind them to bring anything they need to bring if you are doing a lab. I also post this in the LMS so that students who don't read their email will see it. That makes possible to have a more engaged first class meeting even if only half the class did it, and students can email me with anything I need to know before class. Also students who didn't read the email get a reminder that they need to do that  and also can still do it after class.
What are you going to do about the students that didn't do the reading? What about visually impaired students who didn't do the reading?  It's already a classroom management problem just thinking about it. There's nothing worse for a course than a chaotic first meeting. It gets the whole thing off on the wrong foot.
I would think that for the first lab you would want to plan it out carefully so that it takes a reasonable amount of time (leaving time to review the structure of the course and expectations) and right away start showing that class time will be used for active learning. That is do not lecture for more than you plan to lecture during the rest of the semester. That means you will have to assume nothing for that first class and plan a lab that does not require student prep and  is either very self explanatory that you will actively facilitate. It will be better to have it be too short than too long.
I don't know how much experience you have in teaching or in the flipped model, but I can tell you that it requires meticulous planning.  It's definitely worth it to put the planning time in. I have students doing data analysis  with real data in R the first day they walk into my room; it is very do-able with good planning and thoughtful approaches.

Would it be possible for you to share a little bit more about what you do in your first lecture/lab? For example could you share lecture notes or lab problems? I would like to learn from how you get students up and running with R in the first class.

Curious--what percentage of response do you get if you ask students to do something (e.g. send an e-mail) before the first class, and what level are your students at?

@user3067860 My students are usually mid to upper-level undergraduates (not freshman or first semester sophomores).  I would say about half would usually do what I ask them to do.   -- I-like-to-code happy to share some things .... are you going to be using RStudioServer/RStudio, working in the console or something else?  Also are you making a course package?

@Elin I am teaching them R using RStudio, so they will work in the console and the code editor in RStudio. Can we discuss this by email? You can find my email address at my Academia Stack Exchange profile. Thank you.

One big problem could be students who add the course late.  You can post the assignment on the class management software, but if some student adds the class the day of or the day before or the day after the first lecture, then he won't know about the assignment until it's too late.
If this is a large lecture course, this is guaranteed to be a problem.  More so because large courses are usually populated by immature students.  If this is a small, graduate course, then it's much less unreasonable.

It is highly unlikely that more than 10% of your students will read the lecture notes prior to the first lecture, and that's being optimistic. The beginning of the semester is fraught with logistical issues. Often, students drop a course after looking over a syllabus. The students then spend a little time registering for new courses. More time is spent purchasing required textbooks at the beginning of the semester, then during. A student may spend a few hours moving their belongings into a dorm room or apartment instead of reading the lecture notes. Once things "calm down" a bit, students will have more time to read such things. However, I would plan for failure. Design your lectures to be effective even if none of the students have read the notes beforehand.

First day of class? Forget it.  Class hasn't started yet.  Second (and maybe 3rd) day of class? Depends on when drop/add ends at your school, it is likely the first day of class for some.
But you must hammer on the necessity of coming to class prepared, and you need to have consequences of not being minimally prepared pre-class.
Since you are using the LMS, I recommend the way I operate for a "flipped" classroom.
I have 15% of the final grade coming from "readings quizzes", which are short 5-10 question auto-grading (multiple choice, many choice, matching) quizzes over the materials needed to be prepared for class.  These quizzes open 5 minutes after class ends, and they are all due by 5 minutes before the next class starts (1 day per week night course), and have no real time limit.  I encourage students to start the quiz, and start reading, and answer the questions as they go.
I teach IT stuff, so by having these quizzes as 15% of the grade even if someone already knows my subject area (Linux & services administration) from hobby use, work experience, etc. they can blow off these quizzes but the highest possible grade is a middle B.  Even if they are getting 100% on labs and projects, it means that they must do very on the unit exams (which come from both pre-class prep content and labs/project content) in order to maintain that B.  Even the students who know it all already and are just chasing that degree end up taking the quizzes just to give them that extra breathing room on their final grade.
The biggest issue is that some students believe that "Cs earn degrees" - so they do the least possible to maintain that benchmark.
Just remember - you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it a duck.  Good luck!

We do a very similar arrangement for the small amount of R teaching we do. Students are asked (via email) to do some preparatory work before the first class. This involves two things:

a video (and written up notes) on how to install R and R Studio
a short video and set of exercises on finding their way around the R Studio window, using the console as a calculator, learning what a variable is and assigning values to variables.

I wouldn't expect them to read but they do seem to watch the videos, or at least ~75% of them do. This allows us to concentrate on the others during the class.
I'll note that our class is compulsory for everyone that does it. There is no signing up late or dropping out. And our students are used to being communicated with via email - any student that doesn't check their email at least once a day will have found themselves dropping quite a lot of credit in their first year.

Yes, this is unreasonable.  However, what I'm not saying is that you definitely shouldn't do it.
Yes, it is unfair.  Some people may finish some stressful classes the prior quarter, and went through the effort then to register for this quarter's classes, and then pursued some other activities in life (which might be serious, or not; either way should be at their personal discretion) and then not even think about your class before classtime, except maybe to swing by the bookstore to buy books.  That is the standard expectation, and so they may not even know about your additional "requirements" until they show up to your class in order to start learning what your requirements may be.
I read your question carefully enough to see that you may use your LMS system, which may inform students.  However, they may not be checking their E-Mail.  Even if you sent that E-Mail before the prior class ended, they might not pay attention to E-Mail about upcoming courses.  As some other answers mention, there are some boundaries, and they might not believe there is any expectation for them to engage before day number one.

All that said, perhaps the answer (as to whether you should do this) depends on just what your goals are.  Here is a solid example showing the other side of the coin.
I've been a college instructor and I recall a college President telling me (and some other staff) about something he did.  In prior years, he was a college instructor who had a Statistics course.  One thing this instructor was evaluated on was the course completion rate.  The only students who affected the course completion rate were students who registered and remained past the brief initial re-scheduling period (for the first few days, maybe week or so, of the quarter).  So, if a student dropped the class during the initial few days, that person was no longer considered a student of the course and didn't affect the course's rate of completion/mid-course withdrawals.
He had a requirement of completed homework due on day number one, and providing a negative grade for those who didn't turn that in.
He got a reputation of being extremely unfairly harsh.
This tactic also resulted in him scaring away the slackers, so the remaining students (who did put up with this "nonsense") were the truly dedicated, or at least the students who wouldn't shy away from some work.
As a result, anyone who was going to drop his class because of workload typically did so during the first three days, or even before his class started, which didn't count against him.  By getting his "drop outs" to drop out so early, they didn't count against him, so even in a typically less-popular course, this instructor enjoyed some extremely high course completion rates.

OMG this sounds to me like the ultimate example of a bad teacher! A teacher should want to teach as many students as possible as much as possible instead of trying to get them to drop out as early as possible.

@StijndeWitt : As I recall, he said that his classes did fill up (with the motivated and dedicated, since the lazy dropped out).  So, "want to teach as many students as possible" didn't really apply, since his classes were full up.  In part, there might be a humane aspect to this, as the students who dropped early wouldn't be penalized for doing so, and wouldn't get the bad grade that they would be more likely to get if they stayed a while first.  I'm not actually trying to take the stance that this was a good decision overall; just showing some different sides of a different approach.

Perfectly reasonable and my default for flipped classes (excluding first year students as I don't expect brand new students to understand what a flipped classroom is).  The proviso is that your schedule allows time before the first in-person class for students to do that (so 8am Mondays, not reasonable, 3pm Tuesday reasonable).
This should be clearly communicated to students, and the resources available in plenty of time for students to actively do it.  Many will not, focus your time on those who complete their work and follow through on your expectations.  It is annoying for students who do their work if you then teach the class as if they haven't.

Don't even tell them.  Just give them a pop quiz on the first day.  This will send the lesson that they need to pre-read the lessons.  Try to be like John Houseman in The Paper Chase.
(This answer is not entirely in jest.  I think an adversarial teacher is entertaining.  And it can drive learning.  It's actually a topic that I would enjoy in a question.)

It is not unreasonable to ask students to be adequately prepared before they attend any lecture: first, second, third etc.  What is unreasonable on the part of the instructor is to expect the students will behave reasonably.

While I appreciate the phrasing for rhetorical effect, wouldn't it be more fair to replace "unreasonable" in the 2nd sentence with "unrealistic"?

@YemonChoi hmmm... interesting observation.  Googles defines “unreasonable” as not guided by or based on good sense - which is what I mean - but Merriam-Webster gives not conformable to reason : ABSURD, which is too strong.  MW defines “unrealistic” as inappropriate to reality or fact, which is more practical than “unreasonable”.

As snippy as it is, this is actually the best answer. It's not unreasonable, but it likely won't happen, which makes it a bit of a questionable tool from a didactic point of view.

@xLeitix ... depends on your objective.  If you want to establish that the course will require regular prep by the students, this tactic may work although relying on it for the first class is unrealistic.  Maybe in later years the word can percolate from older to junior students...

It is not unreasonable to ask students to be adequately prepared: this looks like a straw man argument. Being “adequately prepared” does not mean to have already studied the content of the lecture. Before the first lecture, being “adequately prepared” means precisely to have the official prerequisites advertised in the catalog/syllabus, nothing more.

@DanRomik My reality is that students who do some work ahead of any lecture are disproportionately represented in the A+ grade level at the end of the year.  The course outline and some course notes are available well ahead of the start of the course, so it is not unreasonable to expect students will have done some work prior to the first lecture so as to hit the ground running.  Unfortunately experience has taught me too few do so.

-1: It is absolutely unreasonable.  The prerequisites of a course is one thing; but asking students to study during a time when they may not be in the same country or even have internet access is obscene and a gross assumption.  In addition you can not assume when people actually signed up for the course.  If the lecture doesn't cover the lecture notes, they're very poor notes indeed.

Reading the notes for a lecture is not preparing for the lecture, it is what you do if you've missed the lecture, or you want to go over the material again.

@UKMonkey It seems your experience is different from mine when it comes to availability of internet or to ability spare a couple of hours to watch a video, as suggested by the OP.  I suppose we agree to disagree.

If you have plenty of free time and good internet service that doesn’t invalidate @UKMonkey’s point. Your argument that the professor‘s request is reasonable would be stronger if you could explain why it’s fair to all students, including those who are traveling, visiting their families in far away places until just before the semester starts, etc., not just why you personally wouldn’t have a problem with such a request.

@DanRomik This is the Holiday Seasons so students DO have plenty of free time, and they don’t arrive back to Uni 15 minutes before the term starts.  Some will travel wherever they travel, and it is fair to assume some may not have continuous web access during the entire recess; but nobody is suggesting students need continuous service or that they should devote their entire break to studying - THAT would be unreasonable.   Students are not cut off the world during a recess: they certainly check their final grades....

... Again, your reality may be different from mine, yet I still have to hear of valid reason as why they cannot do what the OP suggests: what I read in the comments and most answers are lots excuses - some of them pretty thin to be honest - but really: no time? no web access?  It will happen that some are prevented from doing this through exceptional circumstances - v.g. sites firewalled  - but these are exceptions.  Yes some students will register late, but by that logic should an instructor wait until the registration period is closed to assign term work?

@DanRomik  ... would love  to continue the conversation but cannot do so right now.  Maybe later.  Best, ZtH.

@ZeroTheHero no worries, thanks for an interesting debate.

source: Stack Exchange

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

sort: votes


text:
Are certain conferences or fields "allocated" to certain universities? Should I avoid attending certain conferences?
Once I published a few math papers which contained new ideas in a new direction.  This was closely related to my usual field of interest, but went somewhat beyond it. It was not obvious to me how many people in my field would be interested in it. Anyway I naturally wanted to promote my ideas to as broad community as possible.
I was invited to have a talk at a conference of a different community. There I met a person from my usual field. They said (if I understood correctly) that the fact that I visit this conference creates a competition. I feel they were unhappy about it.
Assuming that I understood the remark by my colleague correctly, was it a bad idea that I came to this conference? Is it unethical?
ADDED: I was told that in some scientific schools it is typical to consider some topics as belonging to the school, and others should not work on them. I am wondering how popular is this point of view.

What sort of a competition? Between conferences?

Doesn’t he like competition? I don’t like you competing with me, but everyone else does. If he doesn’t like you stepping on his toes, he can either run or buy steel boots. Here’s a word for him with five letters: Tough.

@Buffy: I think, between the different communities.

You were invited to talk at the conference. One expects the conference organizers to be competent (not always the case, but we always expect it!). If they felt you had something to offer, then you belonged there.

Certainly there was no ethical problem. In fact, I think your acquaintance was off base. Spreading knowledge between communities is a good thing, actually.
Unless there is something not said here, such as a conflict of interest of some kind or a predatory conference, I think it was the other person who is off base. And I also wonder why they were even present with such an attitude.
Do good work. Spread the word.

Thank you. May I add that  I was told that in some scientific schools it is typical to consider some topics as belonging to the school, and others should not work on them. I am wondering how popular is this point of view.

@user65203 Wildly unpopular, I would say.  My initial reaction to your description was "this would only happen in dystopian fiction". If there's a massive failure of clear communication here, and they meant something like "there are a lot of complex subtleties and obscure but important literature in this field that non-experts and those not guided by one would likely miss them and so make errors of fact, or embarrassing omissions or failures to understand the actual difficulty, novelty, and importance of their own work", then that may make a little more sense.

@zibadawatimmy: that miscommunication is easy enough to imagine, though — someone says something like “You can’t really work on topic X unless you’re at institute Y”, meaning “institute Y have such a strong established expertise/infrastructure on topic X that if you’re not at Y, you’ll have a near-insurmountable amount of catch-up work to reach their level”.

@PLL I can image what you say. Thus, I would expect them to offer collaboration, wouldn't you?

@zibadawatimmy You're right that it could happen but if in fact this person is suggesting the OP may have made such errors, the place to state that is in rebuttal to the published papers

@Auspex The place to do that is in peer review at the very latest, and if the paper has been made public enough to be giving conference talks then constructive feedback is to be expected, not sat upon so you can create some sort of polemic counter-paper.

@zibadawatimmy You're being inconsistent. "peer review at the very latest" and "constructive feedback is to be expected, not sat upon"... Peer review isn't the first opportunity for everybody to respond (but, agreed, that's ideal), but I'm saying if he had a problem then it should have been dealt with in the usual channels before criticizing him as an invited presenter at a conference.

all_licenses: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/