After the pandemic I think a lot of teachers changed our lines. The reality is that people have a lot of reasons to be late or absent. It’s the people who are chronically late who have issues, not because the tardy count is important, but because they didn’t learn the material that was covered when they weren’t in class.
All of which is to say, it doesn’t matter if you have a good excuse or a bad excuse. It matters if you’re learning what you’re supposed to learn.
Your second question has a general answer. Most languages use tones, which means tones change in the course of a sentence. If the tone changes for all sentences, then it also changes for questions. I know that’s not what you were trying to ask, but that’s the answer to the question you did ask.
If you need a way to indicate that something is a question, you could do what English does… You could use question words at the beginning of the sentence. You could change word order. You could add extra words… Which is to say, you’re not dependent on intonation, though you could use it if you want to.