A classmate sent him an email when we were in front of the classroom and he replied a few hours later "I left at 17:05"

Can you clarify what you mean by "is it okay"? Do you mean "would his employer punish him?" or "is this moral?" or "is this permissible by the laws of nature?" or something else?

Along the lines of "isn't it excessive?", as a teacher myself (undergrad) it's usual to have tardy students, in that situation I've simply approached them asking for the reason why they are late, in any case, never in my student life had a teacher with so little patience.

It would not be rude to complain about this. Just make sure you do it with a very, very calm tone. Your complaint will be more effective this way.

How large of a class is this? It would be a different story if there are 5 students registered and nobody is there vs. 50. Is attendance part of your grade?

You cannot expect your professor to read emails at all times, so obviously, that email send by your classmate was bound to be ineffective.

This looks like a rant. Image the following post: is it ok for the whole class of students not to show up at my lecture? I arrived 15 minutes before the class, to prepare my material and spent 3 hours yesterday improving the slides, just to find out that no one cares about my subject. I also have an important publication which I am about to submit. It was really frustrating. Is it ok for them to do that? Would it be rude to complain about this matter?

Most of my teachers have asked that you text them if you know you're going to be late, and tell them roughly how. If they know there's been a crash and half their class will be half an hour late, they can plan accordingly.

I'd complain. You have paid for a service. And your professor was paid to be there for the full hour (or however long the lecture was). Leaving early was both childish and dishonest of them.

As several people asked, could you please give details about size of class? Seriously, if more than 5 students are supposed to be there, and nobody is present 5 minutes after class, I would suspect some major citywide event of which I was fully unaware of must have recently happened.

@Dawood - Seriously? Childish and dishonest? When nobody is in the room? The professor may have left a little prematurely, but professors aren't paid to wait in empty classrooms for tardy students to arrive.

I have done this once as a professor. I waited 15 mins and wrote on the board I was waiting for the rest of the three hours in my office, if someone wanted me to teach class. Nobody showed. The funny part was the following week when I started, "Last week, we saw..."

When teaching undergraduate courses I have had a closed-doors policy the first few months. 5 minutes after the start of the lecture the door is locked (to avoid having the lecture interrupted time after time by late students). It helps teach the students to show up on time, and gives the students who are on time a much better learning experience.

@SalvadorDali - except that the professor gets paid (including by OP's tuition) to teach the class, which means they get paid to be in the classroom. It's their job. The students are NOT paid to attend lectures, they choose to do so voluntarily.

@pehrs I had classes with such policy back when I was an undergrad student. But the first day the professor would inform everybody about this, not doing it as a surprise.

@Fuhrmanator that's a diplomatic way of doing it! :D if my professor had done something like that I wouldn't have posted this question and gone to his office, but instead he left without saying anything, at first we thought something had happened to him and waited for a while before giving up. We only found out he left because he replied one of our mails at night.

@DVK as with most intellectual jobs, your job is to do something if there is work to do. You should not sit and do nothing if there is no work at all. Some people even have "no late arrival policy", where they do not allow anyone to enter if you are late even for 3 minutes.

@SalvadorDali - that's different than leaving. And as someone with intellectual job, I find from practice that I'm able to do parts of my job in a quiet empty classroom quite well, TYVM.

Actually in my university there used to be a rule that if by 10 minutes past the start of lecture no more than 2 persons were present then the lecture could be canceled.

Does the professor or university have a policy re: punctuality and what students or professors should do in circumstances like the one you describe? This seems like a situation that needs a documented rule set, but I wouldn't complain unless there is one and the professor broke it. Otherwise, I'd suggest a formal rule set for students and professors that clarifies and quantifies each party's responsibilities re: schedules and response to anomalies therewith.

At my University, the only attendance rule is: "if you miss 20% of the classes (without justification) you are banished from the class", but everyone is pretty lax about it and only Laboratories enforce it.

Just out of curiosity: why didn't you just go to the office of the Prof.? In several years at university it happened several times that our Prof. didn't show up so what you would do is go to their office and see if you catch them there.

@DSVA We did this more or less: 1) checked our mail/message apps in case we missed a notification from him, 2) checked the nearby bulletin board, 3) went to his office, 4) sent mails/texts. In the end we concluded something might have happened to him. There wasn't anyone around to ask about his whereabouts because this is the last class in that building.

@DVK: if the prof should be in the classroom no-matter-what, then I guess you assume that he should start teaching exactly at class time, even if no students are there? After all, he is paid to teach from this time to that time.

@MartinArgerami: "Teaching" and "not teaching" are equivalent when there are no students there to be taught to. So yes, one could argue he should do something in the equivalence class of "teaching" during the entire lecture time, and if that happens to be equivalent to "not teaching" because students are absent, then that is completely fine. It's not outrageous like you make it sound.

With only four students, maybe you should all have a way to contact the lecturer. I would hope the lecturer would stay for a three hour course if he or she knows people are late because of bad weather. But not if nobody turns up with no explanation. With ten out of ten students I would assume either the students are on strike, or I got the date wrong.

@Mehrdad: I read your paragraph five times and I'm still not sure what you are trying to say. With no students present, "teaching" is also equivalent to "sitting in the office". Expecting the prof to stay in the classroom for the whole lecture time when no student shows up is silly.

@MartinArgerami: "Expecting the prof to stay in the classroom for the whole lecture time when no student shows up is silly." Who expected that? Are you even reading the comments? Ann would've been fine with it if the prof had left a note or announcement of some sort, then gone back to his office. Or he'd even been in his office. "Sitting in the office" simply wasn't the case. You're disagreeing with people who are not disagreeing with you.

It is worth considering the weather and transportation issues from the professor's point of view. In bad weather and with subway delays bad enough to make students late to class, he may have been tempted to leave early in the hope of getting home at a reasonable time. The non-response to e-mail etc. may have been due to being in transit.

@Mehrdad: "Who said that?" DVK did. And I was answering his comment.

@DawoodibnKareem "I'd complain. You have paid for a service. And your professor was paid to be there for the full hour (or however long the lecture was). Leaving early was both childish and dishonest of them. " If you put the problem this way, then the right thing to do by the professor was to start teaching even of no student was present, and text the material he covered in the exams.

If I were teaching, I'd have a laptop. If nobody showed up, I'd stay there, hook up to Wi-Fi and find something to do. If I found it necessary to leave the lecture hall or classroom, I would put a note indicating my whereabouts.

@joojaa I’ve had several classes where I was the only student taking the course, or where it was just me and one other student. Glad we didn’t have rules like that here—that could have been rather counterproductive!

@JanusBahsJacquet There should be no lectures as such in a 2 person course, something like mentoring should be done instead. So since there is no lectures then it would't apply anyway.

@joojaa The courses were advertised before start of term as regular courses, with weekly classes. As long as the classes are created at all (which they must be if anyone signs up), they are legally obligated to have classes as well. (In at least one of the courses, these ‘classes’ were just me and the professor going through the coursework in her office; but they were still technically classes.)

I used to be taught by a professor who had a clever solution for situations like that. Whenever nobody showed up, he would just... go ahead with the lecture as usual, thus lecturing to the empty room. To make things more amusing, because (as any mathematician will tell you) any member of an empty audience is a genius, he was able to speed up the lecture considerably. Of course, at the final exam all students were expected to know all the lectured material. Consequently, we were very careful to always have at least one student present at each lecture. (slightly off-topic, sorry for that)

@AnnGreene since we hear the story from one perspective, it is entirely possible that students themselves had a poor record showing up. From OP: last time 1 of 4 showed up, before that 1 of 4, and that one was also late.. I may see some pattern here.

@DawoodibnKareem That is a very poor view on how education should work. Teachers are not butlers or package delivery.

@joojaa it is actually common to have that rule, though people not aware of it, because they bother to turn up most of the time.

@Greg We don't have much of a record with only 2 classes before that one so far. And those had full attendance.

@AnnGreene Thank you for adding it.

Your update makes your question less clear, meaning it is now not obvious to me what you're asking about. Whether it's ok for a professor to leave a class when no students showed up is a totally different scenario from a professor deciding to end a class where only one student showed up.

@AnnGreene Can you please elaborate on how He completely refused to acknowledge the problem?

IMO, the professor ought to make themselves available in their office for the remainder (or a majority of) of the scheduled class time. If a student is late for a genuine reason, it's not fair that they should miss out on the class in its entirety.

@problemofficer He said "it wasn't his problem we couldn't arrive" (a quite rude way to state the obvious). And when I reminded him of the problems we've in your city and he replied he knew because "I'm older than you" thus ending the conversation.

Did you check on whether the university has a policy regarding this?

On my country, teachers are forced by law to cancel a class for the day if less than 25% of students show up. This cancelled class incur no penalty for the students whatsoever, but also doesn't count towards the hours needed to finish the course. It is just re-scheduled for a later day.

as per your edit... he probably could have worded that a bit more professionally, but as you can also tell... he is annoyed 2 weeks in a row a lack of effort from MOST students. I would probably be fairly grumpy too if I was in his position. It's a grad class which means that students attending are doing so for reasons better than "my parents are forcing me to college" as a lot of UG are. So by people not showing up now 2 weeks in a row, is now insulting to his abilities as a teacher being that you only had a few classes.