Student Trove
Attendance tracking with absence limits
How to track class attendance against a 75% or 80% requirement, and be warned before you run out of absences rather than after.
Track absences, not percentages
Most attendance trackers show you a percentage. A percentage is the wrong number to look at during a term, for a reason that is purely arithmetic: early on, the denominator is tiny. Miss one of your first four classes and you are at 75%. Miss one of forty and you are at 97.5%. Identical behaviour, panic-inducing in one case and invisible in the other.
The number that actually governs your outcome is a count: how many absences your allowance permits, and how many you have left. Convert the requirement into that count once, at the start of term, and then track against it.
absences allowed = floor(total scheduled classes × (100 − required %) ÷ 100)
For a module with 48 scheduled classes and a 75% requirement, that is 12. For the same module at 80%, it is 9. From that point the question stops being "what is my attendance percentage" and becomes "how many do I have left", which is a question you can actually answer on the way to deciding whether to skip.
Work out your own allowance with the attendance calculator — it takes total classes, classes remaining, classes attended and your required percentage, and returns how many you can still miss.
How Study Planner tracks it
Attendance is recorded against your existing class timetable, so there is no separate list of sessions to maintain. Each class occurrence gets one of three states.
The third state is the one most trackers omit, and its absence is why hand-kept attendance records drift. Departments cancel classes regularly, and recording those as absences will eventually convince you that you are in trouble when you are not.
Per-subject absence allowances
Each subject carries its own allowed number of absences, because requirements are set per module and frequently differ by session type. A laboratory module with an 80% practical requirement might allow two; a lecture-only module might allow ten, or have tracking switched off altogether. Once the allowance is set, the app counts down against it and warns you when you have one absence remaining — while you can still act on it.
Starting partway through a term
Attendance tracking can begin from a date you choose, so classes that finished before you started are excluded rather than counted as absences. If you have already used some of your allowance before setting this up, reduce the allowed count accordingly — a subject permitting 12 absences where you have already taken 3 should be set to 9. This is the single adjustment people forget, and it is the one that matters.
Why this is worth tracking at all
In South Africa, attendance is usually tied to DP — Duly Performed status, the set of conditions you must meet during the term to be admitted to the final exam. Elsewhere the same idea appears as exam eligibility, course engagement requirements or satisfactory attendance rules.
What makes it worth deliberate tracking is that it is a threshold, not a scale. Falling short does not reduce your mark; it removes your entitlement to write, which typically means repeating the module regardless of how well you were doing academically. There is no partial credit for being close and no way to compensate with a strong exam, because there is no exam.
It is also entirely predictable, which makes it the rare academic risk you can eliminate with bookkeeping alone. Students almost never lose DP by deciding to; they lose it by not counting.
Frequently asked questions
Is there an app to track class attendance percentage?
Student Trove Study Planner tracks attendance per subject against your class timetable. You mark each class as attended, absent or cancelled, and the app maintains a running attendance percentage for every subject. You can also set the number of absences each subject allows, and it warns you when you have one left. It is free on Android, in the browser and on Windows, and works without an account.
How do I track attendance for a 75% requirement?
Convert the percentage into a number of absences before term starts, because a count is far easier to act on than a percentage. Multiply the total scheduled classes by 25% and round down — for a module with 48 classes you may miss 12. Then track absences against that number rather than watching a percentage that will look alarming early in the term for purely arithmetic reasons. Study Planner lets you store the allowed count per subject and counts down against it.
Why does my attendance percentage look bad early in the semester?
Because early in the term the denominator is small, so a single absence has an outsized effect. Missing one of your first four classes reads as 75%, while missing one of forty reads as 97.5% — the same absence, wildly different percentages. Requirements are assessed against the total scheduled for the whole term, so what matters is how many absences you have used out of your allowance, not what today's percentage says.
Do cancelled classes count as absences?
They should not. A class the department cancelled was never held, so it belongs outside the calculation rather than counted against you. Study Planner records cancelled as a separate state from absent for this reason, and cancelled sessions are excluded from the attendance percentage instead of damaging it.
Can I set different attendance requirements for different subjects?
Yes, and you generally should, because requirements vary by module and often by session type within a module. It is common to see 80% required for practicals and tutorials but no formal requirement for lectures. Study Planner stores the allowed absence count per subject, so a laboratory module can allow two absences while a lecture-only module allows ten or has tracking switched off entirely.
What if I start tracking attendance partway through the term?
Set a tracking start date so that classes which finished before it are excluded, then reduce your allowed absence count by however many you already used. If a subject allows 12 absences and you have used 3 before you started tracking, set the allowance to 9. Otherwise the app will happily tell you that you have your full allowance remaining, which is the one error that actually costs you the exam.