There's a scene in all zombie movies where one survivor has to accept the fact that the hulking undead before him or her is no longer a former husband, wife, brother, etc.

After a moment's thought, our still-breathing hero realizes that the zombie in question is just the body, not the spirit, and promptly gets on with the decapitation.

Apparently, most professors haven't seen any of these movies. Because even if you're not in class in any significant spiritual way, they still want you there in body only. And so we sit in Willard Building, staggering, drooling zombies hungry not for brains, but for those ever-infuriating syllabus breakers: attendance points.

Even the most dedicated and sycophantic of us have, at one point or another, been slammed come grading time by an overly punitive attendance policy. There are endless varieties (points deducted for every absence, the psychotic letter grades deducted for every absence, miss so many classes and you can't take the final, the list goes on), but the tune is always the same. Your professor is singing a ballad called "Listen to my Lecture or Feel my Wrath."

These policies are begging you to forget a painfully obvious economic fact: You can't be forced to attend something that you are willfully choosing to pay for.

It's like buying an Xbox and then getting a phone call from Bill Gates about how you're not playing with it enough. You'd hang up on him in a second. Well, maybe you would yell at him about spyware for a while first. But you certainly wouldn't say, "Yes sir," and grab the controller.

But Gates doesn't bother you to play more Xbox. He simply takes your money and donates it to Bono. Your professors, however, feel a bit differently. When you fork over your increasingly astronomical tuition and register for classes, somewhere there is a magical disconnect between, "This is something I am paying to partake in," and "Show up every day or fail."

There are already penalties for missing class, mainly, not knowing the material. If you want to stay home and sleep through that hangover Monday morning, you'll miss whatever material is covered that day, lose credit for any in-class work, and receive late or no credit on whatever was due that day. That's already a suitable punishment.

And of course, there are notable exceptions. If you're in a class that's very interactive, especially one where other students are working with you and are depending on your contributions, then yes, you need to be there. Ditto for discussion-based classes, although I would argue that someone who attends a discussion silently is as good as not there. But nevertheless, there are times when you simply must be in class.

But we're supposed to be adults now. And part of being an adult is balancing one's responsibilities and choosing how to most effectively use our time. If we decide that we don't have the time, energy or alertness to sit through class, that's our choice. If we miss a lot of class, our work will suffer and our grades will drop. That's the penalty. Arbitrarily removing further points from a student's grade is mostly just mean.

And maybe it's because I'm not a professor, but I think that lecturing to eight involved students would be more rewarding than trying to get through to those same eight involved students scattered among 20 droning zombies.

Anyway, I'd love to discuss this more, but I have to get to biology. One more absence, and I'll lose 10 percent of my final grade, have to erase the blackboards after class and be forced to sing a rendition of, "John Henry Was a Steel Drivin' Man" for my professor's amusement. I may have paid to enroll in this class, but it looks like they'd like me to pay again.