Rosenkranz, Todd. University of Chicago Consortium on Chicago School Research, April 2014. High school teachers often assume freshmen are ready to take on the responsibility for managing their own academic behavior. However, students often interpret their new freedom to mean that attending classes and working hard are choices rather than responsibilities, and as a result their attendance and study habits significantly decline. Students miss almost three times as many days of school in ninth grade as in eighth grade. This increase is primarily driven by an explosion in the number of unexcused absences, which is nearly four times larger in ninth grade than in eighth grade. In 2008-09, the typical ninth-grader missed 27 days of school, with 21.4 of those days due to unexcused absences.