How I Deal with Late Papers—and Why

There is allegedly a group of people out there who think you don't need due dates. I say "allegedly" because they are all on "Academic Twitter" I guess, and I am not, so I mostly just hear about them. I much prefer Academic Reddit, which is more curmudgeonly.

If it's not in on time... trash canned!

There was recently some conversation on one of the academic subreddits I frequent about due dates. Someone relayed something they had heard from somewhere else, that it was unfair to enforce due dates in education because due dates don't exist in the real world. Some people took exception to this... but they were kind of right? I wouldn't say that due dates absolutely don't matter in the real world, but they often don't really function as hard lines. If an academic job says materials are due on the 15th, but I submit them on the 16th before anyone actually goes into the application portal, they'll probably make it into the pool for consideration. If my novel manuscript is due on the 1st of the month, but I turn it in on the 5th, the novel will probably still get published.

On the other hand, if I turn in my job materials a week later, the hiring committee might have already met. If I turn my novel manuscript in five months late, I've probably ruined the publishing schedule and no editor will ever want to work with me again. Some deadlines are soft at first, but become increasingly hard the further you get past them.

If I work as an administrative assistant at a paint colorants factory and turn in my part of the monthly report a day late once, my boss is probably annoyed at me, but I don't get fired. Especially if I am good about communication. When I did write my novel, it was clear the manuscript would not be ready on time; we asked for an extra two weeks and the editor granted our request. They, surely, had other things to do, and exactly when our manuscript was one of them wasn't really a big deal.

Actual photo of the author at work.

So in a class, I think there's a couple reasons due dates matter, and any due date policy should be responsive to them:

1. The Students Need a Date To Aim For. Few people work well with completely open-ended tasks. Give them a date to aim for, and they will meet it.
2. The Students Need to Work through Things in Order. Some assignments lead to other assignments, some skills expand on other skills. The three-page paper emphasizes the teaching of skills that the four-page paper assumes students already know. The Literature Review draws on sources they should have found when doing their Annotated Bibliography.
3. Sometimes Work in Class Builds on an Assignment. I might have students discuss a reading in class, using writing they did about that reading as a basis. In that case, the writing needs to be due such that I can depend on students having done it.
   
4. The Instructor Needs a Day to Begin Grading. If I am to structure my time in a healthy, productive way, there needs to be a point in time where I have enough papers that I can begin grading.
5. The Instructor Needs a Point Where Grading Stops. Similarly, grading can't go on forever. I need to be able to draw a line under an assignment and be done with it for my own sake.

When the grading never ends.

Put all these things together and this is the set of policies I've come up with:

• Students Can Ask for Extensions with No Reason... So Long as It's in Advance and to a Specific Time. I will always grant a requested extension if I am approached in advance, and if a new due date is attached to it. If I am supposed to get forty-four papers on a Tuesday, I am clearly not going to grade all forty-four of them on Wednesday. So it doesn't matter to me if I only have forty of them on time, or even twenty. But on the other hand, I think the deadlines need to have consequences otherwise they cease to become deadlines, so students can't just blow by them without asking. I also think the extension can't be open ended. So if a student asks me on Monday if they can turn the paper in on Friday, I am apt to say yes. I won't agree to extensions that go beyond the point where I want to be done grading something. I made it a "no reason" policy because I don't want to be in the business of excuse adjudication, and anyway sometimes students (just like instructors, to be honest) don't really have a good reason they're running late, and I don't want to incentivize lying. Some students get very anxious about asking for extensions—I think they think I am judging them—but I have had students ask for extensions on every single major assignment in a class, and I really don't care.
  
• There Is a Small Penalty if Something Isn't Present When I Begin Grading. My courses are worth about 1,000 points, and I make this penalty 10 points—no matter the point value of the assignment. So if it was a 4-point assignment, they get no credit, if it was their 300-point Final Research Paper, they lose just 3% of their possible points. 10 points is 1% of their final grade. Not the end of the world, but also something you wouldn't want to lose every time. Note that I say the problem is that it's not present "when I begin grading." Like many professors, I often make things due at 11:59pm... but does it really matter to me if it's there at midnight or not? I am not going to start grading at 12:01am. So students get a bit of a grace period. If I start grading at 8am the next day, it's not a very long grace period; if life gets in my way and I don't start grading for a few days... well, great, they got away with it. Why do I care? It was there when I needed it to be.
  
• There Is a Larger Penalty if Something Isn't Present When I Finish Grading. I make this penalty 30 points, so 3% of their final grade. Going back to something I'm done grading is probably my least favorite thing ever, so I am trying to prevent it. On top of that, it's it's this late, the students almost certainly should be working on the next assignment by now, not sinking time and energy into this one. Cut your losses before things get to this point. I used to do the (pretty common) increased penalty per day thing. Say, 10 points off per day late up to a maximum of 50 points. But what I came to realize is that if something was late, it didn't really make a difference to me if it was two days late or four days late, so long as it was turned in so that I could grade it. And a 50-point penalty is pretty steep! So I switched to this policy.
• I Don't Accept Work Once the Next Assignment in Sequence Is Due. Once the next major assignment is due, students get a 0 on the previous one. So if the final draft of paper #2 is due, you get a 0 on paper #1. I also have a policy that if you get a 0 on any major assignment, you fail the course automatically. My experience is that if a student gets this far behind, they are never going to catch up—or they will turn in a bunch of really bad work which turns out to be wasted effort on their part and yours. Like, a paper from a student who is three weeks behind is almost always an F paper, so they are still going to fail the class but just wasted their time writing a paper for a class they are going to fail. So once we get to there, it's game over. This is not a very fun one to enforce, but on the occasions I have allowed an exception I have almost always regretted it.

I am pretty happy with these policies on the whole; I think they are effective but reasonably humane, and I highly recommend something like this to other instructors. Not my specific policies per se, but thinking through why you need late penalties to begin with, and building your policies around that rationale.