The Deadline Dilemma by Karolyn Kuimelis (Chronicle of Higher Education, November 14, 2022)
Excerpts below. See link above to complete article.
“Deadlines are a building block of college courses — they help students stay on track, and they ensure instructors aren’t overwhelmed with a slew of work to grade at the end of a term. And many professors have long been sticklers about deadlines, arguing it’s part of preparing students for their postcollege lives. But late-work policies were a natural point of adjustment for professors during the pandemic: Many swung the opposite direction, replacing punitive policies like point deductions with broad flexibility.
Most professors are back in the physical classroom this academic year, but the context they’re teaching in has changed. The pandemic made student stressors — from mental-health challenges to financial and family obligations — more widespread and harder to ignore. It also made professors more open to different approaches to teaching. As instructors are thinking about which pandemic-era accommodations to keep, a new question has emerged: When it comes to assignment deadlines, what is the right amount of flexibility to offer students?
… Professors who make the case for total leniency say flexible policies for late work acknowledge that students are human, and that balancing nonacademic obligations and personal challenges with coursework requires some level of grace from the instructor. Some faculty argue, too, that traditional ways of dealing with late work are fundamentally inequitable.
…Research suggests that a highly structured course is a big part of inclusive teaching, according to Regan A.R. Gurung, associate vice provost and executive director of the Center for Teaching and Learning at Oregon State University. While flexibility and compassion are part of creating a supportive learning environment, there’s a problem with how many professors — himself included — have historically approached granting extensions.
Gurung, who also teaches psychology courses at Oregon State, says he was “implicitly flexible” before the pandemic. While flexible policies may not have been specifically outlined in the course syllabus, he and many of his colleagues were understanding when students requested leniency — and they assumed that if a student needed an extension, they’d ask for one. The problem with this approach, he notes, is that “far too often, it’s been the student who is empowered or confident or socialized enough to know they can ask for an extension who gets it.”
… Gurung says he was broadly flexible in the early stages of the pandemic. Now, he’s trying to find ways to bake deadline flexibility into his 400-person introductory course. For example, he recently built in a 24-hour buffer to all of his assignment deadlines. And if students need extra time, they can fill out a Google form for a two-day extension. This kind of “circumscribed flexibility” is intended to be an “equalizer between students who have had great high-school educations and are well-socialized for college and those who haven’t,” Gurung says. That’s why structure is an important piece of the inclusive-teaching puzzle.
…“We need to give you timely feedback in order to meet the goals of the course,” Sathy says. “And the best way that happens is if we are exchanging things on a regular schedule.”
Still, she wanted to provide her students with some level of flexibility, so she offers a 24-hour deadline buffer for her weekly assignments. She also drops her students’ lowest assignment grade and changed her point system to encourage timeliness over perfection.
Steven D. Krause, a professor of English at Eastern Michigan University, used to be a stickler about deadlines. He was one of the “older-white-guy holdouts for being really strict,” as he puts it. But he says the pandemic humanized him, and he’s more lenient with extensions now. That’s partly because he’s had to contend with the pandemic’s lingering effects on student preparedness and well-being. He noticed that a handful of students in his first-year writing course — which he’s teaching in person for the first time since 2018 — needed to adjust to the demands of an in-person college course. He had to lower his expectations around things like due dates and attendance, especially at the beginning of the semester.
Kassor thinks this is partly why so many of her students waited until the last minute to turn in their work when she did away with deadline-related point deductions. While some were dealing with acute challenges, she suspected that others — especially those who had just finished high school online — just didn’t know how to manage their time.
After her semester-long experiment with broad flexibility, Kassor decided to radically change her policy: She wouldn’t accept late work for any reason, she told her students.
Instead, she restructured her course so all of the assignments were low stakes; rather than turning in a paper worth 20 percent of their grade, students would turn in an outline for 5 percent, a first draft for another 5 percent, and so on. She also built 10 points of extra credit into the course. Both of these changes were meant to ensure that students could miss an assignment or two and still succeed in the course.
Now, Kassor says, she can better identify which students are struggling with the material and intervene as necessary. She also doesn’t have to be in the business of determining what is a valid excuse for an extension.
“Is somebody helping a family member who’s sick with Covid, or did somebody just sleep through their alarm and not come to class? Often, I don’t know the whole story, and that’s not my job,” she said.