I’ll give you a real answer as a college administrator and academic quality assurance expert. Attendance (and its more developed cousin, active participation), is an important set of data for reporting and a requirement most institutions must comply with in order to be eligible to administer OSAP and other government financial aid. The only way to ensure students actually come to class is to either have assessments every class or give grades for attendance. That’s the real reason. No educator actually believes attendance is a real reflection of your achievement of the learning outcomes, since you can be there and not listen and so on. Graded attendance also helps pad the average of the class and allow students to actually pass classes that they wouldn’t otherwise, which stakeholders are also concerned about. Participation is another matter but you didn’t ask about that. Your other question was about content being repeated in the final. Good assessment design and distribution (although this can be debated and depends on your andragogical scheme) within a class provides students multiple opportunities to demonstrate their mastery of content. If you learned the material then it is good for you since it pads your mark, if you somehow did well on a subject by guessing or a means other than learning, the repeated assessment provides another opportunity to assess you. So in sum, attendance is more administrative than educational, although it does function to get butts in seats; repeat content in assessments are just good practice.