Finding a row and column match with a list and return a specific value

Hello all,
I am having a hard time finding a formula to solve the following problem:
Teachers take attendance at the beginning of their class, but some students are exempted from certain classes because they have already completed that course or for other reasons. Yet, they may be wrongly counted as absent as teachers are unaware of their particular situations.
I'd like to find a formula to be included in the attendance register that searches for matches between the list of students, the class of the day, and the students and classes in the exemption table. If there is a match, it would return a specific text like "Exempted" and leave the cells empty otherwise. This way, if the teacher enters the class name in the sheet, they can see who is not expected to attend that particular class.
I've tried a combination of iferror and index/match or vlookup, but nothing has worked.
Thank you very much for your help; I'd be forever grateful!!

Thank you very much for your help, but the formula you propose is used in the exemption table instead of the attendance table. I may not have been clear enough in describing my problem: I would like the formula to help complete the attendance table, indicating right away when the "class" cell is filled, what students are exempted (if any), based on the information from the exemption table. That way, when teachers start calling the roll, they do not mark a student who is actually exempted as absent.

The result is just the attendance table I attached with exempted students marked as "Exempted" automatically for each class when that's the case. I'm not sure how I can make myself clearer apart from explaining the steps. So, the exemption table is built by a university's administration based on their information on the students (repeaters, specific pathways, etc.). However, the teachers are not necessarily aware of those exemptions because there are actually hundreds of students and they don't deal with administrative aspects. Every time a teacher comes to provide a class, they have to call roll with a "raw" list of students that does not differentiate between those who are supposed to attend their class and those who don't.

If I understand well the formula, it "extracted" the information from the attendance table to build an exemption table. I want the exact opposite: start from the exemption table (which is built by the administration) and indicate from there in the attendance table (filled by the teachers) those students concerned by exemptions depending on the classes that will be provided day after day. So, when that geography teacher puts "geography", it will display automatically "Exempted" in the corresponding lines of students. Otherwise, it will leave the cells empty, and will be filled manually by the teachers with "Present" or "Absent". Hope that makes sense now.

Originally Posted by Glenn Kennedy

Who were you talking to at Post 8? If me... go to Post 10. I got it wrong...

I was replying to HD. Your last formula is exactly what I was looking for! Thank you very much to both of you!!!