Does Not Accepting Late Work Make Students Give Up?

Late work.

A lot of people are saying that we should allow students to turn in their work late without any penalty because if we don't they'll get discouraged and they'll give up and stop trying.

And I think there is a truth to that statement that like at some point kids do get discouraged like if they can tell they're not going to pass if they're so far behind they're just going to give up.

But I think we have to ask ourselves whether allowing late work actually makes that problem better or worse because what happens when we allow students to miss deadlines and allow them to turn things in any time is, rationally, they're not gonna meet our deadlines, right?

They're going to fall behind, and what's going to happen is their backlog of unfinished work is going to accumulate, and then they're going to have their new work as well as their late work that they haven't done yet and still need to do in order to pass.

So, like, reality eventually intrudes here, and makes it necessary for the student to do their work at some point.

And we have to ask ourselves, is it better for the student to do that work on time so that it can function as it's intended in the curriculum, right?

It can be practice before the test.

It can be drafting before revisions.

It can be preparation for some activity that's about to take place.

Like there's a sequence to the learning.

There's a sequence to the assignments in a course that if you break it, the assignment doesn't have the same value.

So like doing all of your work the last week of the semester has very, very little value for learning.

It's much more likely that the student's going to cheat or just kind of phone it in and not really get the learning value that they would have gotten if they had kept up all along.

But also, they're not really going to be able to do that.

A student who is trying to do all of their work at the last minute is not really going to succeed in terms of getting the work done itself or in terms of learning.

So this idea that we're discouraging kids, I think doesn't really hold up as long as the way we're holding students accountable tracks with learning.

Like a lot of people say, well, oh, in high school, I never did my homework.

I never did the assignments and I always aced the tests.

And okay, let's analyze that statement for a second.

In a lot of cases, what people are telling us.

It's almost always guys that say this.

They're telling us, I was a slacker and I got worse grades than I could have.

Okay, what do you want me to say to that?

Like, yes, you could pass the test, but you didn't do any of the work.

There's also maybe potentially an alignment problem there.

And certainly the assignments should be relevant to understanding the material and to mastering the standards.

So if the assignments are not helpful, that's an alignment problem.

It's not a grading problem though, right?

If you are not doing your work, you're probably not learning.

And many, many, many of our students need the incentive, need the accountability of a deadline of, you know, getting potentially points off if they're late.

So I think we've got to keep kids on track time-wise because if we don't, they're not going to learn.

They're not going to learn what we intended to in the order that we intended to, you know, build up their learning and their skills over time.

And they're going to fall behind and they're going to get overwhelmed.

And that is what is going to make them give up.

Let me know what you think.