Question for parents, from a professor

[Anonymous]

I taught grad school classes for the first time this year and ended up being extremely flexible with deadlines. I really regretted it - students became very entitled about expecting endless leniency and it became stressful on my end. I also noted that the late assignments were generally very poor quality so the extra time wasn't helping anyone. I intend to be much more strict with deadlines in the future after this experience.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:As a parent of a college student and someone who has been in the workforce for over 36 years... there is no such thing as a strict deadline in the real world. Unless you are carrying the new kidney to a patient, most deadlines are important but not the be all end all. Sure you may feel bad or a boss my be disappointed for a bit but after a day or two - other more important things come up.

Found the federal employee

funny, more than half of the filing that my agency deals with are requests for extension of time. Often these are filed within 10 minutes of a deadline.

[Anonymous]

Been on both sides of this (prof, parent of college student, and now parent of a TA). Have always felt (a) goal is learning and (b) there are equity issues. FWIW, I think the equity issues are best handled through transparency (first-gen kids often don’t know extensions or incompletes are even possible). And wrt learning, depends on assignment(s).

I taught in humanities/social science in courses where almost all assignments involved essays and where assignments often covered different materials/didn’t rely on mastery of previous material/involved some choice of topics or texts. The best strategy I’ve seen for dealing with lateness in contexts like this is one my PhD advisor used. He announced (at the outset of the course) that all students had 3 days of extensions (one per paper) that they could grant themselves for any reason because we all need leeway sometimes. If you ended up needing more than that, you had to get approval and the reason had to be non-mundane. In retrospect, what I appreciated most about this system (from a TA/faculty POV) is that I didn’t have to hear/compare/adjudicate excuses.

My DC TAs STEM courses where p-sets and labs often build on prior assignments. And where answer keys are often made available immediately after the assignment has been graded (in some courses immediately after it has been submitted). Obviously, this complicates the extensions issue. And they handle it by have a separate makeup test when necessary and limiting extensions to the period during which grading is happening.

Basically, I agree with the posters who emphasize communication (both ways). And I’m fine with different policies for different courses or types of assignments within a course. The world is full of deadlines and flexibility and different kinds of consequences (ranging from none to absolute disqualification) and it’s not my job as a professor to try to instill one right answer in my students (and if their parents think it is, well it’s been your job for 18+ years prior and if you haven’t persuaded /trained them to accept your answer by the time they get to me, then not much I can be expected to do to change that in a one-semester course).

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:As a parent of a kid with learning differences, I think it’s about learning more than strictness. But it is also about accountability and building up to that. So just like the workplace somewhere along the continuum probably makes sense. The workplace does not have super strict deadlines for the most part.

Why would a learning difference impact your ability to follow a schedule? Do you think a boss will cut you slack on deadlines? Nope.

[Anonymous]

My favourite profs in college basically built in no-questions-asked leniency: either dropping the worst homework grade for the semester or giving us 72 hours of late time that we could use across all our homework without getting a penalty. If you had an emergency or unique situation, you could talk to them about it but I never had to because these results gave me enough wiggle room I could learn to manage my time around it.

I also had one prof who gave five midterms, one for each section of the course. The final exam was effectively the same five tests, and your final grade was the better score of the midterm OR final exam section for each unit. So if you did well on the midterms, you got to skip the final, and if you bombed a few tests, you could make it up during the final exam.

Basically, I think I'm saying: building in redundancy and leniency in the course structure helps re-enforce learning while also giving students a bit of flexibility.

[Anonymous]

OP, I am a parent and a high school teacher. Here is my two cents.

I think you are an educator first. You have to think about the population that you serve and what kind of world they are likely to enter. I think the answer to your question likely lies somewhere in the middle if you are teaching college students.

In my high school, many of my students go to community college or trade school. Only a few go on to four year college right out of high school. I am more lenient with deadlines because that is what my students need. I am still trying to convince them that education is worth their time. There are so many distractions in their world. It is difficult for them to see that more education will make it easier for them to earn more as adults.

I don't know what you are teaching, but I will assume that it is a topic area with application in the broader employment market. Where do your students fall in terms of ability to finish in four years? What type of employment or graduate education are they likely preparing for? Are they freshman or seniors? All of these details will be important in figuring out where to fall on the strict/lenient deadline continuum.

It's good to hear that as a college professor, you think about what your students will need in the future. I hope your colleagues do, too.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:As a parent of a college student and someone who has been in the workforce for over 36 years... there is no such thing as a strict deadline in the real world. Unless you are carrying the new kidney to a patient, most deadlines are important but not the be all end all. Sure you may feel bad or a boss my be disappointed for a bit but after a day or two - other more important things come up.

Remind me never to hire you or your children. When I tell you to have something done by Friday, that's not a gentle suggestion.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:As a parent of a college student and someone who has been in the workforce for over 36 years... there is no such thing as a strict deadline in the real world. Unless you are carrying the new kidney to a patient, most deadlines are important but not the be all end all. Sure you may feel bad or a boss my be disappointed for a bit but after a day or two - other more important things come up.

Remind me never to hire you or your children. When I tell you to have something done by Friday, that's not a gentle suggestion.

Wow aren't you a tough guy. No wonder you clawed your way to middle management.

[Anonymous]

I think either way is fine as long as expectations are explicit/apply to everyone and that super strict includes leeway for getting the flu (not “the flu”) or death in the family, etc.

[Anonymous]

Many years ago, I had a professor who was incredibly strict and inflexible about deadlines, and I got burned. I didn't have an excuse like a serious illness or death in the family, but I was going through a really hard time personally and mentally, and just could not finish the paper by the deadline (something like 5:00 PM) - I turned it in a few hours late. He had been very clear that he'd be strict about deadlines, and reflecting back on it, I should have gotten in touch sooner and had the maturity to explain the situation, but I was also a 19-year old sophomore without the professional and life experience to know this. He did not show me any mercy at all and gave me a 0 on the paper. I got a C in the class because of it, which haunted me several years later when I was applying to law school.

Now, after having been through law school and worked in the real world in various law firms and other settings, I think it was a cruel and unnecessary thing to do. I get the rationale of preparing students for "real life," which sometimes does have hard deadlines and consequences for not meeting them (luckily I'm not a litigator), but a little flexibility can be very kind. You don't know what people are going through behind the scenes. Yes, maybe some will take advantage or push it, but to me, the good it can do for students who need it is worth that risk.

In the interest of fairness and not being a pushover, I think it makes sense to ask students to contact you ahead of time for extensions or do some grade reductions for late work (i.e. proportional consequences), but I think extremely strict policies are unnecessarily punitive. College students are just learning to become responsible adults; give them a little bit of leeway.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:As a parent of a college student and someone who has been in the workforce for over 36 years... there is no such thing as a strict deadline in the real world. Unless you are carrying the new kidney to a patient, most deadlines are important but not the be all end all. Sure you may feel bad or a boss my be disappointed for a bit but after a day or two - other more important things come up.

Remind me never to hire you or your children. When I tell you to have something done by Friday, that's not a gentle suggestion.

Wow aren't you a tough guy. No wonder you clawed your way to middle management.

I was thinking this was a distinctively middle management POV. When your job is making sure the people doing the work are on time and on task, you think all deadlines are crucial — your power comes from imposing/enforcing them and you’re evaluated wrt how well you manage that.

If you’re a professional who is hired for/evaluated based on expertise, deadlines (generally) matter less than whether/how well you solve the problem your client needs help with. And lots of your projects may be unpredictable in terms of how much time they will require. You aren’t doing the same well-defined task over and over again. So communication is key — as are triage skills when balancing the demands of different projects/clients. Sometimes meeting a particular deadline is crucial (and it’s important to be able to recognize those situations), but other times, a deadline is provisional/a check-in point and can be renegotiated (or becomes irrelevant because you hit that stage/milestone) earlier.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:As a parent of a kid with learning differences, I think it’s about learning more than strictness. But it is also about accountability and building up to that. So just like the workplace somewhere along the continuum probably makes sense. The workplace does not have super strict deadlines for the most part.

Why would a learning difference impact your ability to follow a schedule? Do you think a boss will cut you slack on deadlines? Nope.

Really?! ADHD, processing, etc I’ll have huge impact on how long it takes to get a similar assignment for a Neurotypical kid done. Plus everyone they are not quite yet in the “” real world. They are students trying to continue to mature there’s not a huge difference between that day they finish high school and the day they start college in terms of maturity level. This is these years are for to keep developing the skills. I had to have perfected it. I work with tons of adults and still have not perfected this and are highly successful.

[Anonymous]

As a parent of a college student and someone who has been in the workforce for over 36 years... there is no such thing as a strict deadline in the real world. Unless you are carrying the new kidney to a patient, most deadlines are important but not the be all end all. Sure you may feel bad or a boss my be disappointed for a bit but after a day or two - other more important things come up.

I think this is overly simplistic. No, there are not typically deadlines that will cause significant real-world impact if missed, but we are not doing young professionals any favors if we tell them it's cool to disappoint their supervisors and complicate the lives of their colleagues.

Missing a legal filing is a huge deal for a client. Missing a reporting deadline is a real problem for other types of professionals.

Basically, the best thing professors and managers of young professionals can do is encourage folks to communicate clearly and early if they anticipate missing a deadline, and striving to meet most deadlines if they would like to see professional advancement.

[Anonymous]

Out of curiosity, do kids consult parents re these workload issues while in college (neither DH nor I did, but our DC does — ahh, texts...)? If so, what advice do you give?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:As a parent of a college student and someone who has been in the workforce for over 36 years... there is no such thing as a strict deadline in the real world. Unless you are carrying the new kidney to a patient, most deadlines are important but not the be all end all. Sure you may feel bad or a boss my be disappointed for a bit but after a day or two - other more important things come up.

Found the federal employee

funny, more than half of the filing that my agency deals with are requests for extension of time. Often these are filed within 10 minutes of a deadline.

That's because you're trying to stick it to the lawyers by having them submit a deadline while you're on vacation. It's Friday and you have to turn it in in four days - July 5th. Happens. all. the. time. Your'e like the @sshole inflexible professors because if it's missed then you cannot submit it. And, you're effed with your client. Power grabbing at its worst.