I'm teaching General Chemistry this semester, and we have lecture MWF for 50 minutes. The students also meet in smaller groups in recitation sections lead by their TAs for another 50 minutes each Tuesday and Thursday, so a total of 5 contact hours a week.

We use in-class clicker questions to reward attendance (worth ~7% of the grade, with enough lee-way to miss a lecture every other week and still get full credit). In addition, there's a ~2-3 minute pre-lecture question available each day for an identical amount of extra credit (7%).

Today after lecture on our Piazza board there was a full on essay about how it was absolutely ridiculous to expect students to put in 5 hours a week into the class. We should apparently not be requiring them to come to lecture, and we're evil for not recording the lectures so they can watch asynchronously (I provide lecture slides and a verbatim script of the lecture ...). They went as far as to say "I would rather attend the recitation sections, because they're more useful since we're doing more examples and working on problem sets, but if I'm required to attend 3 hours of lecture a week to get clicker credit, there's no way I can attend 2 hours of recitation - I just don't have the time."

What ... what has happened to students? I don't understand how 5 contact hours a week has become too much for a Gen Ed course? Besides that, at what point did it become OK to just expect to be accommodated for not going to your assigned contact hours?

I don't even know how to respond to this ...