James M. Lang discusses assignments and grading in “week 6” of his book On Course. He focuses a little on late student work, an issue that I have been grappling with since I started teaching. My policy is that I do not accept late work unless a new due date was confirmed with me prior to the deadline. The issue I have come across regarding late assignments has to do with electronic submissions. I require my students to turn their work in through Blackboard because that is where I grade. I usually do not have any issues with this but sometimes students email me saying they were unable to submit an assignment because of Blackboard complications. I have warned students from the very beginning that if something happens with Blackboard and they are unable to submit their work, to attach their assignment through email so I know they have it in on time. Recently, I entered a 0 in my grade-book for a student who did not turn an assignment in. He emailed me about a week after the assignment was due and said he was confused because he really had turned the assignment in before the deadline and doesn’t understand why it now shows up that he hasn’t submitted it. I allowed the student to “resubmit,” although somewhat reluctantly. I wasn’t sure whether I should have told the student that it’s too late and he needs to be more responsible (like checking back to make sure his work was submitted) or trust that he had no reason to assume the work wasn’t submitted and this was Blackboard’s fault, entirely. To be honest, I am not much of a stickler; I tend to have a more laid back teaching persona just because I think it makes things simpler for me not to stress over every little detail. But, I thought about ways I could avoid technical problems like this and considered asking students in the future to turn in physical copies of their work alongside submitting electronic versions. But this also bothers me because I’ll have stacks of paper that I will not even grade or look that…I’ll just end up throwing them out at the end of the semester, too.
Another concern is whether I should have allowed the student to resubmit but still penalize it for being turned in late, regardless of whether it was intentional or not. Lang cites Ken Bain who argues that penalizing late work “puts an undue emphasis on the assignment as a performance, as opposed to seeing assignments as a learning experience” (136). He argues that if a student is willing to do extra work on an assignment and will learn more from it, “does it make sense to penalize a student” who turns it in late? (136). If I had an ideal classroom and my students actually desired to turn in a larger project than expected of them, then I absolutely would not mind giving students a few extra days. It’s a learning experience for them and I would encourage it. But, in my experience, students who have asked me for a few more days to work on a project haven’t even started on it at all (they did not turn drafts in, for example). Bain essentially argues that teaching students to adhere to deadlines in the classroom does not mean they will do so in the real world. But there are practical reasons for not wanting students to turn in late work (aside from Lang’s discussion on fostering future upstanding citizens). Teachers have busy schedules too and we set aside hours and hours for grading and allowing students to just turn their work in any time they wish without penalty will just get in the way of us successfully completing our own work. I remember once giving my students until the end of the semester to submit a revision of an assignment and when the semester was over, only a few out of twenty-four students turned a revision in (even though many of them did not do so well). When I assigned a deadline date the next time around, more than half of the students who needed to revise the assignment turned in a revision. Giving them stricter assignment rules encouraged them to get the work in and in the end, improved their learning (which I can assess by the improvement in their work). This is not to say that I don’t believe in flexibility when it comes to teaching or that there are exceptions to the rules I set forth, but that in my experience so far, assigning deadline dates and adhering to them forces students to make better decisions and ultimately makes my job easier.
Pedagogy 