Rationales for deadlines

I use deadlines and time limits for many different reasons:

• I have a deadline by which I have to turn in grades to the university. It takes me time to generate grades from student work, so I need the work to be turned in enough before my deadline that I can do that.

  Time limits on exams are similar: I have to return the room to the university at a specific time.

• Students learn better if their attention is not split too widely. Having the deadlines for assignments related to topic A before I begin topic C helps keep the number of topics they need to consider to a manageable number.

• Sometimes I want to measure speed as a proxy for internalized knowledge. It’s faster to answer questions you know well than questions you have to puzzle through and there are some things I want you to know well.

  This is problematic because there are many individual variations in speed, both speed of reciting what you know and speed of puzzling things through.

• Grades are in part a proxy for future productivity as an employee; in that context, speed is worth grading.

  Deadlines aren’t the best measure of speed, but they do at least somewhat get at the idea.

• The outside world has deadlines; I should prepare my students for that by having them as well.

  This is problematic because it conflates requiring something (in this case timeliness) with teaching that thing. If I want my students to learn timeliness, I should come up with educational material teaching it.

• Many students have difficulty motivating themselves to do their work without the joint pressure of a grad and a deadline.

  This is a sad commentary on the motivation structure students have learned before they come to college. My peers are smaller schools tell me it is also a motivation structure that large universities’ seem to select for and that is less common in smaller schools. I would probably be better to teach them a better system of self-motivation, but that is something that neither I nor other instructors I’ve talked with have had much success in doing.

Deadline structures I’ve used

I’ve taught classes with hard deadlines: miss the deadline and get a 0.

I’ve taught classes with staged late penalties: miss the deadline and you start losing points on the assignment until some point where late submissions are no longer accepted.

I’ve taught classes with a late-day budget: you get 2 late days per assignment can can use them all on one assignment, spread them over the assignments, etc. I’ve not yet let early submissions earn more late day credits, but know others who have.

I’ve taught classes where deadlines are adjustable by before-the-deadline extension requests, both ones with instructor review and ones with automatic granting of extensions.

I’ve taught classes with a fixed set of scheduled retry opportunities: deadlines are fixed, but if you miss one you can try for one of the later chances instead.

I’ve taught classes with no deadlines, only a recommended schedule.

One of the reasons I’ve used so many schemes is that none is perfect. They each had pros and cons, being better for some situations and worse for others. I’ve pretty much abandoned the grade penalty for lateness approach because it chains penalties: a student who gets a day behind tends to stay a day behind and lose points on every assignment from then on. I’m almost ready to abandon the the no-deadlines approach because of their disproportional negative impact on some students’ ability to keep up. But the others all remain on the table each time I consider the grading system of a course.

Split grades

When I was designing a TA training course several years ago and added a session on grading I had an exercise where TAs in the course were asked to decide how to weigh various contributors to a grade. Should a student who missed every deadline and was annoying to interact with get the same grade as a prompt and pleasant student if they ended up with the same understanding of course content? If not, how should those factors be weighed?

Ever since my first inclusion of this session on Spring 2016, I’ve pondered on it in other settings. Why are we combining separate factors into one grade? How would education be different if we weren’t? For example, what if instead of having a deadline policy that contributes to your direct grade I gave you two grades at the end of the course: Content A+, Timeliness C−? Or three: Content A+, Timeliness C−, Academic honesty B?

I can’t change the university systems to accept multiple types of grade, but I can change my course to track and display different types of grade during the semester. For seven years I’ve toyed with doing so, and for seven years I’ve decided not to, but it remains appealing. Maybe next semester will be the one.