On the other hand, when I teach I call roll the first week of class and that's about it. I

Gawd sounds fucking glorious. The CNC program? Started at 7am. First 10 minutes were calling roll. If you weren't in the room by the time roll was finished, you lost a point. You could lose three points across a quarter without it negatively affecting your grade. And yes, students whose names began with "W" got ten extra minutes to get to class. Every.Day.

At the other school attendance was also taken every day. Which gave the instructor a good fifteen minutes to argue with students about the pronunciation of their names. Every.Day.

I think the more infantile the program, the more its students will be infantilized. I suspect that a 300-level OChem lecture is going to have a lot fewer of these traps than a 100-level English lecture but I also think that five years from now the 300-level OChem lecture won't be immune. Of course, the more spendy the college the less likely you are to put up with it; once you have your Team Elite membership it's all academic anyway.