19 Deadlines

Students regard deadlines as mere suggestions. You can remind them in every class session and put it in writing. They remain deaf and dumb. “I didn’t know that.” Since they were oblivious, they expect an extension of the deadline. They are terribly shocked when you impose late penalties or refuse to accept their work after a certain date. Some try to pull the dodge of being absent on the day the assignment was due. I just tell them I will impose a late penalty regardless that they the printer or the computer stopped working at the last minute or whatever excuse they give as justification whey they cannot hand in the work on time.

Still others claim they were on time but you never received it in your mailbox or the e-mail. I get around that dodge by asking the students to give it to me in person. I also require students to keep copies of all assignments they hand in. I tell them so we can all be good friends in case the work may be “missing” – this can be pegmatite but too often it is not.

I stick to late penalties and refusing to accept work because it is unfair to those that hand in the work on time so there is a level playing field. I also want to avoid marking a ton of papers at the last minute.

I have tried two approaches. One approach is having the assignment done over a period of time with the final draft due at a certain date. Thus I collect subsets of the work three times with the final version due on a certain date. At other times, I have an early deadline such as sixth week of the semester! I tell the students since they do things at the last minute any way, they might as well do my project first and get it out of the way before they do other term projects at the last minute. I had one student that managed to hand it in the term project nine9 weeks late after such a date! She actually appeared five minutes at the end of the last class where I gave back all the assignments and final examinations! For the record, I gave her a low grade and told her to see a shrink!

I had another student that wanted to hand in learning logs for the first half of the semester 10 weeks after they were due and eight weeks after the last possible deadline extension I had given. She wanted the credit but had no explanation of why she had been unable to do these for the past three months! She felt I was being unreasonable!