This was my experience studying in the Netherlands as well. University officials were indeed on board with this, with the general assumption being that lectures and instructions and labs and such are a learning resource that you can use or not use at your discretion.
Maths at my Dutch university also has homework for quite a few of the courses, which often counts for something like 10-20% of final grade. It can usually be submitted online, so you only need to be physically present for exams. However, there are a small number of courses that are exceptions to this, and actually require attendance to some extent (e.g. a course on how to give a scientific presentation, where a large part of the course consists of students giving and commenting on each other’s presentations—not so easy to replace the learning experience with a single exam at the end).
This was my experience studying in the Netherlands as well. University officials were indeed on board with this, with the general assumption being that lectures and instructions and labs and such are a learning resource that you can use or not use at your discretion.
Maths at my Dutch university also has homework for quite a few of the courses, which often counts for something like 10-20% of final grade. It can usually be submitted online, so you only need to be physically present for exams. However, there are a small number of courses that are exceptions to this, and actually require attendance to some extent (e.g. a course on how to give a scientific presentation, where a large part of the course consists of students giving and commenting on each other’s presentations—not so easy to replace the learning experience with a single exam at the end).
But this differs between Dutch universities.