But on the school side, some pay for classes and go to them, others pay and skip a few classes. Still, others would prefer to dress in a sequined green top hat and matching bow tie while downing bottle after bottle of Guinness or Killian’s Irish Red beer.

Whatever students choose to do on St. Patrick’s Day, a religious day in Ireland (and to some it could be called religious in East Lansing, but for a different reason), they must accept the consequences for their actions. St. Patrick’s Day occurs once a year, and we were lucky enough to have it on a Saturday last year.

With the holiday falling on a Tuesday this year, classes will undoubtedly be skipped by a handful of students.

Professors, though, should refrain from penalizing students through pop quizzes or in-class assignments for not attending class.

Professors are aware of the fact that students will be absent from class, and that should be a penalty itself, as many classes have attendance policies that detract from overall grades with a certain number of missed classes.

Assigning extra work on St. Patrick’s Day is a malicious way to prove a point — let the student who misses an important lecture suffer later by not being fully informed for a paper or exam.

At the same time, there should be no reward for showing up to class, such as an extra credit assignment. Offering such an incentive only legitimizes the claim that MSU is a party school, as word would spread quickly that St. Patrick’s Day is such a draw that professors feel the need to provide a gift to encourage attendance.

Those swarming the bars will be far fewer in number than those in the classroom, but the ones who are gracing the bar scene must do their best to not give students a bad reputation. With last year’s Cedar Fest riots still fresh in the city’s memory, being not even a year removed from the incident, it would serve MSU students best to not give the city any formal reminder of how powerful drunkenness can be when gathered into a central, intoxicated brain trust.

In general, be safe and know your limits. If you’re partying, it’s a long day with a lot of places to go. People will be tempted to drive while drunk (take a taxi, please), to disrupt the public (don’t be too loud when it gets late in the evening, it’s still a Tuesday) and possibly destroy municipal property (find whatever shred of common sense remains, and don’t).

But this is a student community that should be cautious, given past interaction with the city of East Lansing. St. Patrick’s Day is a fun holiday — there is no need for it to devolve into Cedar Fest ’09 today or any other day.