Background: Student absenteeism is a major concern for higher education and especially for medical studies.
Aim: This work was conducted to assess the extent of this phenomenon among undergraduate medical students at the Faculty of Medicine of Sousse and to determine whether certain student characteristics affect student absenteeism.
Methods: We conducted a descriptive cross-sectional study among first and second year of medical study students from the faculty of medicine of Sousse during the second semester of the 2015-2016 academic year using a pretested self-administered questionnaire.
Results: The response rate was 80.9%. Of the respondents, 9.6% reported never having attended the lectures. The reason that justified this absenteeism was the boring teaching. Absenteeism was significantly associated with gender (15.7% of male students never attended versus 7.1% of female students, p = 0.015), with the year of study (7.4% of first-year students versus 12.1% of second-year students, p = 0.0001) and the repetition of the year (9.1% of non-repeaters versus 21.1% of repeaters, p = 0.002).
Conclusion: Various reasons for missing classes have been identified which suggesting the complexity of this decision. Knowledge of these factors could potentially help university medical teachers to develop innovative teaching strategies that would reduce the rate of absenteeism.