deadlines

This is my Week of Complaining, I think. I complain laughingly — laughing to keep from crying, to be sure, laughing bitterly, but hey, I’m laughing. Give me some credit.

All teachers, I think, are shaped by our experiences as students. We remember what we liked, what we hated, and what confused us, and we determine our policies and procedures accordingly.

When I was a student, nothing frustrated me more than professors’ varying attitudes towards deadlines. Only a very few of those I knew were strict about deadlines; almost everyone gave some leeway — but it was often impossible to tell how much. Some would give a few extra hours; others a couple of days; and some clearly followed the get-it-to-me-when-you’re-done rule, though they never, as far as I could tell, openly admitted it.

Similarly, there were widely differing attitudes towards formal extension of deadlines — you could never know in advance whether a request for extension would be granted, and in any case, the extension just created a new deadline which you didn’t know a given professor’s attitude towards. If you asked for 24 hours but took 48, would the prof be okay with that? Who knew? You had to roll the dice, which offended my sense of what a teacher’s responsibilities are. Either you have deadlines or you don’t, I would think, and you owe it to us to say what the real rules are. Stop playing games!

Meanwhile, I would bust my hump to get an essay or exam in on time, letting it go with regret for its shortcomings — only to discover that classmates who blithely ignored deadlines got all the time they needed to polish their work to a fine gloss. (I mean, if they were into that sort of thing.) This didn’t seem fair — though I noticed that those who got into the habit of acquiring extensions were just kicking cans down the road, and would find themselves late in the term standing confusedly in the middle of a roadful of cans. I didn’t (and still don’t) think professors who readily granted extensions were doing their students any favors.

When I became a teacher, I soon discovered that I was as inconsistent as my own teachers had been. It took me a while to establish clear procedures, and then longer still to learn the discipline of following them. My rules are these:

One: My deadline is absolute to the minute. If I tell you to email me an essay by 11:59pm and you send one to me at 12:01am, you get a zero.

Two: No extensions will be granted unless I get an official letter from a doctor or counselor or other appropriate figure of authority, and if the extension is granted, then that deadline becomes absolute.

Three: If the deadline is rapidly approaching and you see that you won’t be able to finish your essay or exam, turn in what you have. Then, later, we can sit down and discuss the situation and agree on how to proceed.

I am of course aware that this policy, while I believe to be admirably clear and straightforward, is rather different than what most professors do, and the consequences for messing it up are significant. So I

highlight these rules on my syllabus and my FAQ page;

explain them (and my reasons for them) in class during the first week of the term;

by email and in class, remind students of them one week before an essay or exam is due;

by email, remind them again 24 hours before an exam is due.

All of which brings me to this week: Here at the end of the semester, two students missed a deadline and then told me that they hadn’t realized what my policy is.