Late Work Is a Logistical Nightmare — And It Undermines Learning
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder discusses how accepting late work indefinitely creates impossible grading logistics while sending the wrong message about deadlines.
Key Takeaways
- Late work creates a grading backlog - Teachers can't provide timely feedback when work trickles in weeks after the deadline
- It undermines the learning sequence - Assignments build on each other; turning in old work after moving on provides less educational value
- Set reasonable limits - A clear late work policy protects both teachers' sanity and students' learning
Transcript
Let's talk about why late work doesn't work.
It sounds great to accept late work without penalty and a lot of districts are encouraging or requiring teachers to accept late work from students without taking off points because there's this idea that like taking off points for lateness does not reflect a difference in the learning so it's kind of an unfair penalty to take off points for lateness, but I think there are a lot of practical reasons why accepting late work without any kind of penalty simply does not work.
If you think about over the course of a semester, say, students have a given amount of work to do that hopefully is spread out, right?
You don't have all of your work due at the end, you have it spread out over time, and assignments are due at particular times, For reasons, right?
Like as a teacher, you plan your curriculum and you plan the assignment due dates so that you can build up to something.
Like if you're doing a term paper, there might be steps along the way to that term paper.
If you're doing labs, there are things that have to be done in a certain order.
quite often for the learning to progress in the way that it's intended to.
And if you allow students to do that work out of order, often the learning value disappears.
So there's a learning aspect.
There's also a very practical aspect for teachers that if you have 100 or more students, if you have, you know, 50 to 100 assignments per semester, you're talking about like 10,000 possible pieces of work.
100 times 100 is 10,000.
And normally we rely on efficiency in grading, right?
If I'm going to grade 150 students assignments, at least the assignment is the same.
The scoring criteria are the same and I can very quickly go through them.
But if students can turn in anything, anytime, at any point in the semester and still get full credit, then I'm having to switch between not only students' work, you know, from one kid to another, but between different assignments that have completely different criteria, different grading scales, different purposes, like what am I looking for when I'm grading this?
And like 10,000 instances of switching just takes orders of magnitude more time than grading everything at once when you collect it.
And I think we can't just dismiss that as, you know, an adult concern that's not in students' best interest.
Because like this whole thing is not in students best interest letting students turn things in any old time is not in their best interest because if they're doing their work out of sequence in the semester the learning value is degraded they're missing something by not having done it on time and we're teaching them that it doesn't matter to do your work on time so like I think this came from a good place it came from a good intention that we could maybe avoid unfairly penalizing students who have difficult lives and like I think there's there's always room for individual teachers to be flexible and say okay yeah you were dealing with something in your family.
So I'll accept this late without penalty.
We can always have that flexibility, but mandatory flexibility as a policy that constrains teachers and forces them to take late work anytime without penalty, I think is a disaster for teacher time and productivity, but it's also a disaster for student learning because it teaches them that it doesn't matter if you do your work on time.
Let me know what you think.