Timeline for How to handle students who try to negotiate away penalties for late submission of coursework?
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| Apr 13, 2017 at 12:49 | history | edited | CommunityBot |
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| Dec 1, 2016 at 11:02 | comment | added | kwah | The above ignores the purpose of a deadline: to give students (roughly) equal time to complete, after which additional work is considered an unfair advantage over other students. In which case, the the moment when work stops and the submission is sent is important, not when it arrived. Normally we're counting in seconds but, to take it to the extreme, consider work sent via an email which takes three days to arrive - do you grade according to the sent date/time, or the received date/time? | |
| Dec 1, 2016 at 3:54 | comment | added | Joshua | I saw a case of instructor disclaiming loss of test answers from network problems when it turned out the instructor's software was so badly designed that it was the primary cause of the data loss. When implementing on http, it takes a special kind of ignorance to fall over completely on momentary drop. The default behavior is to recover. | |
| Nov 30, 2016 at 14:19 | comment | added | Dmitry Grigoryev | Avoid scheduling submission deadlines during busy hours. Consider when you would prefer Windows Update to reboot your PC, then use that time as deadline. | |
| Nov 30, 2016 at 13:24 | comment | added | orbatos | Having provided service for, maintained and worked on systems such as these I caution playing too fast with specific times in light of a potential problem. However, in nearly every case your IT will be able to determine if there was an appropriate attempt to submit the files at the right time and in the correct manner. What I usually recommended to faculty was to make sure work could always be submitted, allowing for legitimate problems (as can be verified by IT), and to provide an out in the form of additional work to make up points (errant students rarely do additional work). | |
| Nov 30, 2016 at 13:08 | comment | added | djsmiley2kStaysInside | Compare it to a job situation, if they were a contractor they just broke the terms of their contract (have work done by X). A good contractor will make sure it's working before this time anyway, and leave time for 'issues' to arised. My dissertation was finished, and bound 2 weeks before submission date - I still remember the queues (and some crying students) who were waiting to get theirs bound on submission day. If you know the date and time, you have no excuse for missing it due to difficulties which you couldn't of highlighted prior to submission time. | |
| Nov 30, 2016 at 12:11 | comment | added | Tim | 1000 other students and I had a large assignment due on October the 3rd, of this year. On the Friday before, the printer network went down. On Monday, it took 20+ minutes to log in to a computer. Thankfully, they allowed us an extension into the next day, but without that a lot of students would have been stuck... | |
| Nov 30, 2016 at 9:34 | vote | accept | I Like to Code | ||
| Nov 30, 2016 at 9:27 | comment | added | Nobody | @TomášZato The way I understood the OP, they were talking about web forms, so there would be the time when the POST request first arrives on the server which should be close enough. But really, I'm not saying anyone should use a system like this! What I wanted to say is make sure the rules are clear, but if they are not clear you can't interpret them against the student. | |
| Nov 30, 2016 at 9:19 | comment | added | Tomáš Zato | @Nobody There's a secondary problem with sent by X. If a mail deadline is for sending, I can just forge the sent timestamp (of course, by no more than ten minutes). | |
| Nov 30, 2016 at 9:17 | comment | added | Nobody | @TomášZato Yes exactly, and for physical mail you are told whether the deadline is for sending (post stamp date) or arriving. I've encountered both. And the same also holds for electronic mail. So you might say "...has to be submitted to the system by xxx. Submitted means fully and successfully transmitted onto our system." and ideally go on with something like "If you encounter IT problems yyy before the deadline, contact @@@, after that time but still before the deadline hand your submission in personally at our office zzz." That's the standard procedure for important things where I study. | |
| Nov 30, 2016 at 8:58 | comment | added | Tomáš Zato | @Nobody I also don't understand the button thing. It's like arguing that a work that is to be delivered as a physical email is not late if you sent it before deadline. Obviously, you have to send it before deadline so that it arrives on time... | |
| Nov 30, 2016 at 8:31 | comment | added | Nobody | @luator I don't think such a system would be a good idea, I just meant that if the deadline is worded poorly the students might claim they understood it like that although it was not meant like this. And if it's not completely clear then you can't hold it against them. By that reasoning, all the rules start being worded like laws (complicated but hopefully unambiguous), but that's how it is. If you are trying to rely on good sense you get just the arguing the OP is trying to avoid because that's something everyone has individually (and can stretch individually in their own favour). | |
| Nov 30, 2016 at 8:04 | comment | added | luator | @Nobody: I don't really agree with the button thing. It should be well known that uploads take some time and, at least for me, it is obvious that I have to start such an upload early enough that it is finished before the deadline (besides, it would make the upload system overly complicated). Also if I don't plan enough time to be able to check if the uploaded file is okay and maybe reupload it, this is just my fault. If students do not do that... well, they learned their lesson for the next time. | |
| Nov 30, 2016 at 7:00 | comment | added | Stephan Kolassa | @Nobody: good points. But make sure that button clicks are logged with timestamps before putting that in the syllabus... | |
| Nov 29, 2016 at 20:32 | comment | added | Nobody | I agree, but think that things like "if the university servers went down" should be emphasized more. As a student I've encountered too many buggy software systems likely built by a teaching assistant in a few hours. Also if the wording is bad, the deadline could possibly be interpreted as "clicking the submit button by that time" and the university should then have server logs showing when exactly that button was clicked (respectively when the the file transfer was started) and count by that time and not by the time when the transfer finished. | |
| Nov 29, 2016 at 16:28 | history | answered | Stephan Kolassa | CC BY-SA 3.0 |