One of the greatest temptations you’ll face when you are at uni is to skip the odd class. Of course, some of the time you’ll miss classes for genuine and legitimate reasons such as illness. At the other end of the scale, you’ll sometimes miss classes because of reasons that aren’t quite so pressing. While you shouldn’t make a habit of it, even the most diligent student will occasionally skip a lecture. And then there are other reasons in between, like having commitments to university sports clubs, societies or work experience.

Whatever the reason that led you to miss a class, however, the fact is that in doing so you will have missed out on information that is in some way relevant to the coursework or exams you’ll be required to do later on, which in turn will form part of your grades and, by extension, your degree classification.

For this reason, if you do miss a class–whether it is due to a real illness or a self-inflicted one, shall we say–it’s definitely worth making the effort to make sure that you catch up on what you’ve missed. Here are some of the key ways to do this.

Check your course’s VLE

In this day and age, it’s very rare for lecturers not to produce handouts and PowerPoints to go with their lectures. Often they’ll cover a good chunk of what the lecturer went through, even if they’ll lack some of the detail or extra insight you’d get from the class. In most cases your department will have a virtual learning environment page (Moodle, Blackboard, WebCT etc) where these materials will be uploaded. So if you head on over to it you should be able to download them.

The alternative to this is emailing the lecturer and requesting a copy of the materials. The downside of this is that it’s not appropriate to email the lecturer to inform them about missing a class if there wan’t actually a good reason for it.

Copy a coursemate’s notes

Lecture handouts and PowerPoints will point you towards what was covered when you miss a class, but they won’t tell the whole story. The lecturer is likely to have expanded on the points laid out in these materials, with it often being the case that the handout and PowerPoint won’t make full sense without knowing what was said in the lecture.

So if you miss a class, the best way to find out what was said is quite simply to borrow lecture notes off someone who did attend. If you don’t know anyone who does your course particularly well, don’t fret. While in the past borrowing someone’s lecture notes involved a fair bit of trust as you’d have to take the handwritten notes away from their author to either rewrite them or get them photocopied, now it’s just a question of quickly snapping them with your phone’s camera.

If you do copy notes in this way, do remember the good turn that person’s done you by being similarly helpful if someone asks to copy your notes at some point in the future.

Ask a friend to record the lecture

While sometimes it’s last minute things that cause us to miss a class, at others we know in advance that we won’t be able to attend. If this is the case you’re at an advantage, as you can make preparations to catch up on what you’ll be missing.

By far the best way of doing this is requesting a friend who’ll be going to the class makes a recording of it for you, either through you lending them your phone/tablet or them just recording it on their own device and sending you the file. This way even if you do miss a class you’ll still know exactly what happened in it.

Do remember, though, that while these tips will help if you do miss a class, there is no substitute for actually attending, especially when it comes to seminars and other classes where you get to actively participate, ask questions and put across your thoughts. So don’t go relying on them too often!