Why Student Deadlines and Late Penalties Should Be More Lax

It’s common practice for teachers to use deadlines and late penalties as deterrents for students who request extensions or turn in late work. One teacher, however, provides a peek at how and why she morphed from a rigid to a more flexible deadline/late penalty policy and what she observed as a result.

When Brenda Thomas began teaching online in 2015, her policy was to deduct 10% of the grade for each day an assignment was late, which was the maximum allowed by her school. She thought that would make everything fair, but later found that three repeating scenarios made her question this decision:

1. Some students turned in high-quality work, but received lower grades due only to lateness.
2. Some students turned in low-quality work, but received higher grades than the late, high-quality assignments due only to timeliness.
3. Some students received exemptions from deadlines/late penalties, as her school periodically requested that faculty grant leniency to those affected by a major natural disaster in their geographical region. Students experiencing other issues beyond their control (illnesses, injuries, technical glitches, etc.), however, had to abide by the set deadlines.

Meting out punishment or pardon based on these reasons and timing made Brenda feel more like Judge Judy than a teacher. Since she was already foregoing late deductions for weather, she decided to do the same for other issues beyond a student’s control, but only if the students contacted her prior to the deadline with a valid reason. As a result, she was inundated with eleventh-hour extension requests for a variety of reasons. Those who contacted her after the deadline with a valid reason received the same consideration.

It was around this time that Brenda read an article suggesting that teachers abolish deadlines and late penalties altogether, but she saw three main problems with that approach:

1. Every class eventually ends, so there is at least one deadline there. The author of the article said he never had a flood of assignments submitted at the end, but Brenda was unwilling to risk being the exception to that.
2. For students to improve throughout the course, they need to receive feedback in between assignments, so multiple deadlines spaced throughout the course are necessary.
3. Not having deadlines or late penalties facilitates procrastination and removes incentives for timely work.

Brenda wanted to assess her students more on the quality of their work than the speed with which they completed it, while also encouraging timely work without using the incentives of extra points for timeliness and lost points for lateness. Her course ran for seven weeks, with a writing assignment due at the end of each week. She did not allow assignments to be turned in after the seventh week ended, but she did allow students five extra days without penalty for each of the six assignments due in the first six weeks.

If students turned in their assignment by the deadline each week, she graded it and allowed them to revise and resubmit after seeing her feedback. For those who turned in their assignment during the five-day grace period, they also had the option to revise and resubmit after seeing my feedback. If students turned in their assignment after the five-day grace period, then they could not revise and resubmit after seeing their teacher’s feedback.

With this policy change, Brenda observed that only two or three students chose to revise and resubmit, and even fewer turned in assignments after the five-day grace period. As a result of the new policy, her grading workload did increase, but only by a negligible amount. More importantly, Brenda noticed that:

1. The number of assignments receiving late penalties noticeably decreased.
2. The occurrence of excuses and extension requests became almost non-existent.
3. The incidence of grades reflecting the quality of the assignments exponentially grew.

Brenda’s experiences show that a little forgiveness around deadlines and late penalties can go a long way. Her students started getting fewer lateness penalties, making fewer excuses, and most importantly started getting grades that better reflected the quality of their work, rather than when exactly they turned it in. For more information on this topic, check out this article.

Allison Green
Boston Tutoring Services