How to deal with students who lose their digital work?

Question

In my courses, students work on large, on-going projects, but submit some parts each week, showing their progress. All of the work is done on a computer or table.

Mid-semester, I always get reports from students of technical failures, e.g.:

• Deleted entire project folder.
• Reformatted hard drive or upgraded system without backup.
• Sent computer to be repaired, cannot work on project until it returns.
• USB not unmounted, files broken.
• Device containing project folder lost or stolen.

I want to create a policy which is not so harsh as to turn all of these students away. At the same time, I worry if I am a little lenient, students will start claiming problems every time they forget to do their homework. What is a good policy that is not too harsh, recognizing that technical problems do happen, yet which cannot be too easily abused?

Answer 1

You should deal with them in the same way that you deal with students who claim to have lost non-digital work. Here are two reasons:

1. This is not really any different from when students complained that "the dog ate my homework." Both paper and digital formats are susceptible to being damaged, lost, or destroyed.

2. They will not get any special exceptions from their boss when they lose important digital documents in a real job.

My students do most of their work in digital formats and I've never made special exceptions. I suppose I would do so in some unusual circumstances (say, a university server where they were told to store their work had been hacked).

If you want to help them develop better digital work habits, introduce them to backups, Dropbox and/or version control. But I don't think that is your job.

Answer 2

Based on this question, as well as based on your previous questions (e.g., here, here, or especially here), I get the impression that students in your school are leading the teachers on quite a bit. I have been teaching large undergraduate courses (400+ students) at a public university in central Europe for years, and many of the problems you often seem to stumble into are pretty much unknown to me. For instance, I can literally remember a single incident where one of my many students claimed that he could not finish his homework because he lost data due to a technical problem. You, on the other hand, make it sound like this is a regular occurrence.

As I don't think that your students are somehow inherently more prone to lose data due to no fault of their own, the logical conclusion is that they are (at least in the majority of times) just making up excuses. Hence, the question is not "how to deal with students who lost their digital work?", but rather "how to deal with students who claim to have lost their digital work?".

My answer to this question (and, incidentally, also to your other, previous questions) is to treat your students as adults. Among other aspects, this means that they are responsible themselves for any technical issues on their end, the real ones as well as the made-up ones. Yes, this will mean that occasionally, somebody will actually be struck by a problem innocently, but at a university, adults are supposed to handle problems by themselves. To me, this is a large part of the learning process at a university - there is no safety net that catches you when you are behaving unreasonably (and, yes, not correctly backing up your homework definitely falls into this category).

So, my answers to your problems would be (formulated a bit more politely, but no less directly):

Deleted entire project folder.

Too bad. Do it again.

Reformatted hard drive or upgraded system without backup.

Too bad. Do it again.

Sent computer to be repaired, cannot work on project until it returns.

Use one of the computers in the university lab, or borrow a computer from a friend.

USB not unmounted, files broken.

Too bad. Do it again.

(Also, speaking as a computer scientist, this is so unlikely to happen on modern file systems that I would be very much inclined to think that you are lying to me.)

Device containing project folder lost or stolen.

Restore from backup. If you have no backup - too bad, do it again.

Answer 3

A few years ago, these were legitimate (if sometimes dubious) problems. With the arrival of free and easy-to-use cloud storage, however, there is no reason that anybody should ever have to lose data again.

Dropox has a free account that provides 2 GB of storage, automatically backs up any time that you are on the network, and gives the ability to undelete files and roll-back to previous file versions across something like a month of time. Since it's cloud-based, it can be linked to another computer should one be broken or stolen. As long as your students aren't doing something extremely data-heavy, like art & design, the 2 GB limit shouldn't be a problem.

Given this, why not set up a policy as follows:

• At the start of the class, state that students who work electronically will be expected to keep good backups such that "the digital dog cannot eat your homework." Introduce the class to Dropbox as a recommended solution, but let them know that any cloud-based backup is OK (there are lots of other solutions available too, but Dropbox is currently the best for both universal availability and simple user interface).

• Then, during the semester, if somebody comes to you with a tale of woe, treat it like you would somebody failing to show up for a quiz. There might be extenuating circumstances, but they are rare and probably come with the equivalent of a doctor's note (e.g., a campus police report on stolen property).

Answer 4

You say your students already:

submit some parts each week

Simply ask them to submit the whole project folder (perhaps in a zip) instead. If they lose their work, they can always roll back to the last version they gave you.

Advantages of this:

• Requires no extra training for the students. They already know how to send you folders.
• Requires no extra work by you. You already have a system for dealing with folders they send you, just keep using that system.

Disadvantages:

• If the projects are very large, it may be difficult to send them. Many email providers have size limits on attachments, and uploading large files takes time. Although you could just ask students to send you a link to their DropBox.
• Files use more space on your disk.
• There is some latency associated with recovery. It may be some time until you (or the TA) see the student's request for the last version. If, like I suspect is commonly the case, they have a habit of "losing" work a few hours before the deadline, they may email you saying they lost their data at 3 am, and claim that they couldn't finish the work in time because you didn't reply quickly enough.

Alternatively, you can require them to use a version control system, such as git (there are other version control systems, but I've never encountered a reason to use them over git besides "the rules say I'm not allowed to use git"). With GUI tools like GitExtensions and TortoiseGit, not to mention numerous tutorials online, this is extremely easy to figure out even for novices. Set up repositories for them, and communicate that they will be graded for that week on the last commit before that week's deadline (also solves the "but you looked at the wrong branch" problem - if they have several branches, they can make sure their final commit is to the preferred branch). Advantages over the "send whole folder" method:

• No busywork on your part required. You don't have to go into twenty emails, download attachment, rename and organize it every week.
• If they lose data, they don't require your intervention. They can check out from their repository themselves.
• As git will only upload the difference between states, if there are large files that are static between revisions, subsequent commits will be small and take up little network bandwidth or disk space.
• Students get experience with a good version control system that is widely used in the industry.
• Students learn first hand about importance of versioning. Likely, individuals who managed to get in college will immediately understand that the more frequently they make commits, the less work they'll need to redo if they lose data. If for some strange reason they cannot comprehend this, you can explain it at the beginning of the course.

Disadvantages are:

• Students (and you!) must now learn git (or whatever system you choose). Although, perhaps "you better go learn git right now or you will fail this course" is not a bad thing for students to hear at certain points of their education.
• Students may try to get tech support for git from you, or get upset when you tell them to go elsewhere (such as stackoverflow) for that.
• You must set up a repository for them to use. However, your school's IT department would probably be able to help with this, and even the worst case scenario of "set up a free account on BitBucker or github" is not that bad.

Answer 5

Possibly what you could do is give your students an educated fair warning. Show them how to make backups!. Knowing how to backup data, especially for system administration, is an invaluable skill, and can save people countless hours of time and frustration. My teacher expects us to make backups of our files regularly because of the possibility of data loss, and since she told us how to do it (if you don't want to do tarball, or zip backups, you can use cloud services such as Amazon or Dropbox to save files), there's no excuse to have lost anything. A CS student should be competent enough to not have this happen!. Frankly, any CS student should be aware of, and familiar with

1. How to make a backup of important files in Linux or Unix using tar -cvf [file_name] [folder_name]
2. How to extract using tar -xvf
3. How to make backups in windows using either Windows © tools, or simply making zip files of important folders.
4. How to use online services such as dropbox.
5. How to write shell scripts to perform regular backups either in Bash, or if using Windows, .bat files.

If you provide them with this knowledge, which should only take about an hour, or even provide a handout or a web post about this issue, and inform them that data loss is common, and steps need to be taken to prevent this, then they are completely liable for any irregular data loss that occurs. Also, you are in the clear a a teacher, and have given your student an invaluable lesson on data management and possibly Linux/Unix/Windows skills they didn't have prior to meeting you. Of course these are just suggestions. I do wish someone would have taught me how to make a simple tarball backup script on day one. Would have saved me much grief. Happy teaching! :)

Answer 6

I too ran semester-long projects with mostly freshmen and found it sufficient to "strictly" enforce a lenient late-work policy:

1. I always accept late-work until a stated buffer time before grades are due
2. I assign one or more drafts/pre-work (i.e., outlines, notes, actual drafts) of all major assignments for a non-negligible portion of the total assignment grade.
3. late work is always assessed a daily diminishing penalty starting at the due time, regardless of reason for lateness; I don't have the formula in front of me, but I think it ranges from 15 to 2 points/day

I inform the students at the beginning of the semester that I'm not in the business of gauging the validity of their excuses, and have instead a generous, consistently applied policy which will allow them to recover (through diligence) when life gets in the way.

The net effect is that the draft phase of the assignment is the only one where they can completely lose their work before I, at least, have a backup copy. At this early point the consequences of a data loss aren't failure of the assignment (unless they neglect the importance of the draft phase, for which I have no sympathy.)

In practice, I've found that the policy has the desired effects:

• My non-slacker students who have occasional life or technical issues have been able to recover with minimal final-grade impact
• I don't have to waste mental overhead on feeling unfair, debating whether I'm being lied to or manipulated, or worrying about being biased in my adjudication of excuses
• The slackers we intend to punish with a strict due-date policy are still astonishingly capable of using the generous policy to hang themselves
• Students almost never completely write off an assignment (or the course), because the diminishing penalty preserves enough value that it always makes sense to do the work (isn't that the real goal?)
• I get to feel like my students learn the more valuable life lesson of how-to-dig-myself-out-of-holes-of-my-own-making-through-working-hard-to-catch-up as opposed to the alternative lessons of how-to-burn-with-perceived-injustice or how-to-shrug-and-never-complete-the-work-because-it-will-no-longer-be-accepted.

I realize it takes a philosophical shift to let go of the notion that we need to reject late work. I also realize this answer is basically just a variation on the current most-popular no-special-policy answer, but the implementation differs enough that I thought it might help you approach the problem from other angles.

Answer 7

It may simply be that Ben has unluckily come across more students with academic integrity issues than many of us. A sensible compromise is to say to the class that certain 'excuses' for non-submission of work are not really going to hold water, and others would require some actual evidence, or a properly formed description of what has gone wrong.

Regardless of your outlook, things do go wrong, I have been involved in many cases of USB drives failing and even the most reliable forensic and data recovery tools being unable to recover the data. This is more-so if a drive suffers from certain types of electrical damage. However, I agree that CS students should at least have some good practice under their belt in terms of data management, backup and continuity.

However, are they really adults yet? Of course not! All the statements about them being adults and now they need to learn to be adults. Listen to yourselves, please - they will be a few years in post before they become more adult and start to take real responsibility for their actions. I train new employees on a monthly basis and the main thing is to allow them to shadow someone with sound technical skills and integrity, they need to 'learn' to become professionals and as such build the skills we expect of a professional practitioner (our domain is IT Security) - they certainly are not all ready when they arrive from University to make sound business (or in many cases technical) decisions.

There is nothing wrong with showing them good data management techniques and actually I would argue that as a practitioner of over 20 years service, its is imperative to show them the principles of data management. One solution does not fit all, some IT security organisations would rather their employees do not use the services of Dropbox (for various security and non-dislosure reasons), however as a basic backup facility and data repository, it is ideal for students. We train all of our staff in data management, so why would you not educate students?

I liked the fact that Joshua took the time to show how to use the tar command (and extracting from a tar file) using Linux. To support this, there is an excellent (if perhaps a rather Unix biased) tutorial at: http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Teaching/Unix/, which covers the (basic) use of tar, gunzip and to be fair provides a very nice introduction to Unix. Most of this will work on Linux too, with the odd usage exception and of course side-effects may differ. Therefore, even if you lack expertise, it's likely not a good enough excuse not to provide some sort of guidance. That guidance may just be to make use of a suitable resource that provides the skills or knowledge, and that's what a good teacher does - you can't be great at everything (and remain a modest and well-balanced human being).

Answer 8

I do not work in academia, but have faced almost identical problems many times as a business owner.

The underlying problem is that:

• You do not want to allow people to consistently take advantage of the system
• But you also don't want to be too harsh with "innocent" people who have found themselves in a tough situation. (we've all fail to achieve an expected goal every now and then due to circumstances outside our control)

I always address this problem using some form of this basic pattern: - Be lenient on first transgression - Be strict on future transgressions - Do not "judge" the quality of excuses.

For example, this is what I might do in your case:

1. Have a "known" policy of allowing one transgression.
2. Have an "unknown" policy of affording leniency on the second transgression. (Always afford leniency, but don't tell people that you will do this until they find themselves in hot water. This will help you to not have to fail people who took a "strike 1" when they probably shouldn't have, but then found themselves with a legitimate problem later on)
3. Afford zero leniency on the third transgression.

What is really nice about this type of policy is that you don't have to be the arbiter of who has a "good" excuse. People always have a good excuse, especially the people who are gaming you and the system. You can consistently execute this policy the same way for all students. It will allow the "innocent" students to always succeed. It will allow the "players" to succeed just as long as they are taking their studies seriously overall. And you will be able to fail incapable students without even having to listen to their reasons for not having done their work because after all, you already gave them two chances and statistically, it is extremely unlikely that they had three legitimate "emergencies" in one semester.

Answer 9

Well speaking as someone who until recently was a student and someone who doesn't like to see all the slackers get off, but on the other hand, I have had technical issues before.

I would say: 1. DropBox, AeroFS, Google Drive, etc. are everyone's friend 2. CrashPlan and Time Machine are also everyone's friend.

With those two, most excuses will be gone. If you introduce them and students are too lazy to use them, then I don't see a lot of need to feel sorry for them.

I had a laptop get stolen once while I was in school, and I lost all of the data on it, mainly because it was all less than a month old so it was not included in my monthly backup (and things like DropBox didn't exist at the time yet).

On the other hand, I had a Macbook with a dying hard drive that randomly corrupt files and/or refuse to boot while I was in the middle of my MBA program. I would re-install Mac OS and it would work for another week or so until it exploded again. With DropBox and Google Drive, it was a simply a nuisance rather than a disaster.

You can also mention to your students that: a. You don't recommend changing or upgrading their computers during the project b. You don't recommend upgrading their OS during the project c. You don't recommending them using a beta OS or changing OS during the project. d. They should be careful what they install on their computers.

i.e. the computer should be a tool to do their work and not something to play with and hack on.

The answers suggesting to use CVS, etc. are a bit silly unless the students are computer science students. Version control tools offer less benefit when dealing with binary files and the learning curve is steeper.

Answer 10

Use Git!! Why? Both your and my question have the same answer: "You must award failing grades for failure to submit assignments." Git is so pragmatic, its usage will solve your dilemma and provide students will practical experience with a ubiquitous technology!

Git is a source code management platform that functions as a repository for safe-keeping of all code revisions. In doing so git enables independent collaborative efforts to be merged safely into branches, each of which carries along with it a required message and an exact differential of the code between commits.

Sure, diligent frequents to the great outdoors like your computer science students working offline in the wilderness will inevitably eventually have their laptop eaten by a bear, their digital work for class mere free radicals in the wild.

While close inspection of one's abrasions and tattered garbs can reveal much about wild ursa and truth, an emotionally-detached audit of your classroom's Git repository can actually do a much more practical job. Honest efforts committed throughout the course will shine brighter than his sunburned scratch marks -- and an empty repository will surely ease your apprehensions regarding lending no leniency at all.

Using Git is an amazing part of the software development process. In fact, utilizing git as the central repository for digital work allows for brilliant collaborative efforts among the student body. Perhaps a test would be the random distribution of APIs among the students and the assignment to write code to implement it. You my consider not divulging the function of the assembled code until the next day, when you can put it together, together!

Answer 11

One of digital media professors laid down the rules (this was back in 2004 or so) under which he would accept the "my files were lost". You needed to have three different back ups, in three different locations. For example, physically at your residence, physically on campus on a portable drive, and online on the campus storage, all of which magically lost the files at the same time. Note that campus storage, like many modern-day cloud backups, in theory could recover files deleted (though doubtful they'd spend the time for a student's lost paper).

Since the chance of all backups being lost simultaneously is for all intents and purposes zero, he was able to all at once

1. Make his policy of not accepting "my digital files disappeared" as an excuse.
2. Encourage better than good backup strategies.
3. Give a reasonable exception to policy (reduces complaining) while knowing full well no one would make use of it.

Answer 12

A story a few years back: My ssd failed on me, and in the same week a certain individual with a certain file hosting service was arrested, with the file servers being shut down. Luckily, I had only recently moved to the cloud and still had an external hd with a two-week old backup on it.

My teacher gave a bit of leeway, warned me about using dubious hosters and gave me a week extension period. I'd advise a strict position, except when their backup service is legitimately compromised. This could even happen to a major service.

I guess a more legitimate file hoster wouldn't have had this problem, but it's still ultimately out of your control. I now use a combination of an external hard disk (or two, depending) with Google Drive and OneDrive for easy file transfers to my phone & tablet, as well as an additional backup.

Answer 13

From the sound of it, the assignment is being submitted little by little, over many weeks. In that case, students can retain their previous weekly grades, but lose credit for the most recent iteration.

Say it's a matter of 10% a week for ten weeks. The student has successfully made five submissions, earning up to 50% for those weeks. In week 6, the files get lost. The student gets a 0 (out of 10) for week 6.

Hopefully, the file will have been recreated by week 7. If not, then another 0 for week 7, etc. until the end of the course.

Basically, the student gets credit on an ongoing basis for successful early submissions and loses credit for each week of "failure."

Answer 14

Further to @DavidRicherby's comments: For the last couple of years I was at Plymouth University, the university was providing each student with an enormous amount of storage space on a OneDrive for Business account, with fully-automatic backup and version control. If you're nervous about the privacy and security implications of involving a third-party cloud storage contractor, I guess that, at the cost of some effort in setup, you could achieve the same with a university-managed git server.