Database design to track student attendance
To expand more on @Twinkles alternative, I'm concerned about why you're storing present and absent students in your attendance data. Is it because you want to be able to run a report that shows all kids and whether they were absent on a given day? There's a better way to do it.

Most systems I've seen store either the that the student is present (Positive attendance) or the student is absent (Negative attendance, although rarely referred to by that name). The decision on which to use came down to the structure and reporting requirements of the school (and whoever they report to). 

If you're school is concerned when the student is absent for reasons like having to track Truant students, you should use a standard (negative) attendance structure. Most K-12 schools in the US  do it this way. 

If you're school only awards credit for courses after a verified number of hours have been completed (e.g. Johnny doesn't pass the course until he's completed his coursework and attended 12 sessions of the class), then a positive attendance structure could be used. 

Assuming your data looked like this: (Ignoring the course_id in your example for simplicity)

Attendance: 
id | student_id | date       | 
------------------------------
1  | 2          | 2013-10-24 | 

Students:
student_id | student_name   | 
-----------------------------
1          | Johnny Johnson |
2          | Bobby Tables   |
3          | Suzie Smith    |


To get a report of all the kids at your school and their attendance status for the day, you could run a query like:

SELECT s.student_id, s.student_name
,  CASE WHEN a.id IS NOT NULL THEN 'Absent' ELSE 'Present' END as attendance_status
FROM Students s
LEFT JOIN Attendance a on s.student_id=a.student_id AND a.date = '2013-10-24'


Which would return: 

Result :
student_id | student_name   | attendance_status |
-------------------------------------------------
1          | Johnny Johnson | Present           |
2          | Bobby Tables   | Absent            |
3          | Suzie Smith    | Present           |