Does Accepting Late Work Set Students Up for Failure — Or Give Them a Chance to Succeed?
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder discusses the tension between accepting late work to support student learning and the real-world expectation that deadlines matter.
Key Takeaways
- Both sides have a point - Rigid deadlines can prevent students from demonstrating learning, but unlimited extensions don't prepare them for life
- The purpose of the assignment matters - If the goal is learning, accepting late work makes sense; if it's building responsibility, deadlines serve a purpose
- Find a reasonable middle ground - Policies like accepting late work with a grade reduction or a limited window balance learning and accountability
Transcript
Should you accept late work from students?
On the one hand, if a student is not doing their work for a period of time for whatever reason, and then they somehow get their act together, they start doing their work, they show an interest in making up their back work, should you let them turn that work in for full credit or partial credit?
I'm inclined to say yes, but...
and I'll get to that in a second, but I'm inclined to say yes, because I'm thrilled if a student wants to start doing their work again, and probably it was something external in their life that caused them to have difficulty getting that work in in the first place.
So I'm thrilled if students turn their work in.
The but comes in when we have to think about the incentives that we're creating.
If a student is falling behind on their work, Obviously, we want them to get caught up.
But if we say, hey, you can turn in your work late, I'm worried that by putting that out there just as kind of a general policy, kind of an encouragement to all students that you can turn in your work late, I'm worried that we're actually encouraging that.
late work.
I'm worried that we're actually making the problem worse and telling kids that it doesn't really matter if they get their work in on time.
And, you know, a lot of the reason that we have deadlines in school is that life has deadlines, right?
School is designed to mirror the rest of life.
And in a lot of cases, getting your work in late does not get you any credit as an adult, right?
You could be long fired by the time you get your late work in if it's too late and you got to pay your taxes on time.
And there are just lots of deadlines we have to meet as adults, and I think it serves students well to have that reflected in the structure of school, but at the same time, I feel like we can be gracious, we can be understanding, and we can recognize that it's a good thing when students start to get their act together.
But at the end of the semester, I always remember as a classroom teacher just being so irritated at the handful of students who would realize at the end of the semester that they had done very little work and were definitely going to fail.
And their feet were to the fire because their parents had sent them in and said, hey, you need to go get all your back work.
And one of my colleagues sent out an email to all staff saying, a lot of kids are asking me for back work.
Here's what I found from this fitness website on, you know, here's some back work you can do to work your shoulders.
And, you know, what is this back work that students are asking for, though?
I don't know what that is.
And we all had a good laugh about that.
We don't want to create a system where students are motivated and encouraged to put everything off until the last week of school because what happens then is the work suffers in quality and the opportunity to actually learn from the work, the learning benefit of doing the work has mostly been lost by that point, right?
So it's not just a matter of getting credit, it's also a matter of learning.
And I think for the most part, we need students to do their work on time if they're going to get the learning benefit from it.
So I think there are some pros and cons to accepting late work, maybe with no penalty here, but let me know what you think about this.