Why I Dumped the Due Date (part 2)

"I got my [assignment] done. Sorry about the delay, things are tough, I'm figuring it out. Part of life, right? Or all of life? I certainly appreciate your setup right now." 

I got that email from a student this week.  It really made me feel good.  My student completed the assignment of reading the week's materials, posting a question for exploration in the discussion forum and responding to other students' questions. Would it have been better if she'd done that work in week five, when the conversation was at its peak?  Well, sure, but better late than never!  If I'd enforced the due date, she wouldn't have done the work at all and would have missed that material entirely.

I don't know what is tough in her life, and that makes me feel good, too.  Not that she's having a hard time right now, of course, but that I don't have to evaluate whether the situation is tough enough.  And she didn't feel like she had to convince me. Who am I to judge?  Things were tough, she's working on it, and she got the work done when she could.  Good enough for me.

Or...maybe she's making it all up.  We've all had our share of dead grandmothers. But I don't think she is, because she doesn't have to.  Why do so many grandmothers die during midterms?  Because that's an excuse that just about everyone will accept. (Or used to, anyway, before the modern plague of dead grandmothers!)  But my students don't have to make sure their excuse meets my personal standard of "bad enough." I leave that to them.  Sure students will abuse the freedom to skip a due date (or two, or three, or....)  But they penalize themselves by doing so.  It's harder to catch up in a class than it is to keep up.  And my grading system STRONGLY encourages keeping up, without penalizing those who have one or two late assignments.  I don't feel the need to exact an additional penalty. 

 

Okay, I'm supposed to be writing about how I counter objections to my "no penalty for late work" policy, so here goes. 

It's impossible to keep up with 100+ students' work without due dates.

I have a lot of sympathy for this objection. It drove me crazy when a student would hand in a late paper when I wasn't prepared for it.  I'd usually stick into my bag  or tuck it into a book and hope would make its way to the stack on my desk that I'd collected last week.  I still remember the frustration of trying to keep track of the flood of papers coming and going between me and my students in the bad old days BC (before computers.)  Ah, but that was then and this is now, AD (after digital.)  And here I will shock everyone by saying something nice about Blackboard.  Students all submit their work via Blackboard and all I have to do is open the grade book and there it all is.  I grade each class once a week.  Anything submitted that week gets graded.  I don't have to remember if I gave someone an extra three days.  I don't have to remember if I gave that extension three days ago or four.  If the student does the work, I give them feedback on the work and the student learns something.  Students who don't do assignments don't learn from them.  (I also color code my gradebook to help me easily distinguish a pattern of late work indicating trouble ahead.  Maybe I'll write a blog post about that one of these weeks.)  So I keep up quite easily, far MORE easily than if I had to keep track of individual exceptions to a "no late work" rule.

I also discovered that I prefer the variety of not grading 25 or 50 or 100 of the same assignment, all at once!

Some students aren't mature enough to set their own pace in a class. 

True enough, but I prefer to treat them all as if they are rather than treating them all as if they are not. I do have some policies that I use to prod along the slowpokes and chronically disorganized, such as the grading policy mentioned above. I also grade each week and email those who are falling seriously behind.  And I withdraw any student who hasn't completed at least half the work required by the student withdrawal deadline.  If you are THAT far behind, no matter what the reason, you won't catch up and it's better to cut your losses now.

 

If you don't enforce deadlines, students won't work at the same pace and can't get the most out of group work or the classroom experience.

That is an excellent point, and I addressed this point to some extent above.  It's a trade-off.  If I enforced due dates, perhaps more students WOULD keep up and get more out of the class.  But those who miss the deadlines would get nothing out of the assignments they were unable to submit at all.  Is it worth cutting some students off from the work entirely to encourage others to keep up?  Which of those options you choose depends on the value you put on that immediacy of interaction.  But I do think there are coming changes in education that will tip the balance more and more toward giving students access to the class work at their own pace and in their own time.  Increasingly, educational technology is being designed to allow students to work at their own pace, to move ahead if they find the material easy or to slow down and concentrate on a topic that has stymied them.  Classes where everyone is required to move at the same pace, regardless of whether an individual student has mastered the material or not, are going to seem more and more anachronistic to students used to being in control of their own learning. 

 

We're training them for the real world, where late work has penalties.

Coincidentally, two days after I published my last post on Why I Dumped the Due Date, Anthony Aycock wrote an opinion piece in The Chronicle of Higher Education called "Don't Be Hard to Get Along With" in which he contrasts his experiences as an employee and most students' experiences in the classroom.  While I don't agree with everything he wrote, he makes a very good point.  Do we working professionals adhere to a "no late work" policy and expect tangible penalties if we don't meet them?  Should I ask the division Admin Assistants what they think about professors' abilities to meet deadlines?  Hmm?  Now, it is true that not all workplaces are as accommodating, and that's too bad.  Perhaps we aren't living in "the real world."  But it seems pretty real to me. I really value working at a place where, if I forget to fill out my textbook orders until Holly reminds me that I missed the deadline, I just get it done and the order goes in. (Sorry, Holly!)  And I choose to run my classes the same way.

 

There is one more objection that I didn't anticipate when I wrote last week's blog post.  I discovered it as I read the comments to Aycock's article and it isn't very pleasant to contemplate.  I was really shocked by the number of commentators who expressed undisguised anger and contempt about their students.  Lazy. Manipulative. Disrespectful. "Unique little snowflakes." Often these epithets are coupled with the assertion that it is our responsibility to teach these brats respect.  Especially respect for their professor and his or her rules.  But that just seems self-defeating to me, and I noted how often it was those who were most vigorously defending firm due dates who had stories of the most outrageous student misbehavior.  Treat students like they are incapable of conducting their own educational lives and I guess some will strive to live up to that assumption. 

 

I'm not fond of trendy slogans, but I do try to be the "guide on the side," and that include ceding as much responsibility as I can to the students themselves.  Some might (and do) argue that setting and enforcing due dates IS teaching responsibility.  But I'm after a more fundamental accountability.  As my student said, "things are tough, I'm figuring it out."  Nobody's setting any due dates on that.  It's all up to her, and I'm glad I could help.