I am currently both a teacher and a student, and I am of the apparently controversial opinion that late work should always be accepted. Not just if they have a doctor’s note or their mom’s death certificate. Not just for one or two assignments a semester. Always.
“But that’s unfair to the people who submitted on time!”
I didn’t say you had to give everybody full credit. Drop the grade for each individual assignment by 5% for every day late until it gets down to 20%. Never, ever take it below 20%.
Here’s my rationale:
1. If you are a good educator, then you created that assignment in the first place because YOU WANTED YOUR STUDENTS TO LEARN SOMETHING. You still want them to have an incentive to complete that learning experience even if it’s not “on time.”
2. You want to prepare your students for the the real world, right? Well, if you missed a deadline (for example, submitting report cards), would your boss throw away everything you’d worked on, dock your paycheck, and tell you to try again next time? No. They would be upset with you, but they would ask you to take time out of your schedule to finish the project as quickly as possible. It wouldn’t cease to exist.
3. Based on point #2, if you are teaching high school or below, not accepting late work is holding children (who by the way, generally do not have full control over their schedules or what materials they have access to) to a higher standard than adults.
4. If you are teaching college or graduate school, you are working with adults who are taking years out of their lives and paying thousands of dollars to learn from you. Why make it harder for them than it already is?
5. You have or will teach students with extenuating life circumstances that they don’t tell you about (e.g. chronic illness, caring for children or sick relatives, abusive relationships) because they are embarrassed to share this information or have already been taught to shut up and stop making excuses.
6. You have or will teach students with learning disabilities that they don’t even know about. I was diagnosed with ADHD in high school after years of being treated like I was just a bad kid. I suffered from depression and anxiety for over ten years before I went on medication. I did not even learn the words “executive dysfunction” until I was in grad school.
In conclusion, yes, we all know that being a teacher gives you authority but that’s no reason to flaunt it by imposing restrictions that don’t exist anywhere else in the name of “education.”
All of this. In addition, I have a private and secret policy of not even imposing late penalties. Between poverty and an undiagnosed circadian adventurousness, my undergraduate career was one gigantic extenuating circumstance, but I was never docked marks when I turned in something late. For me to turn around and not extend the same grace to my students would be both ingratitude and hypocrisy.
