Reply to Professor here -- curious to hear parents' perspective on this

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]

But there's more to it than just learning the material. We are preparing these kids for the real world.  When they're in the working world, there will be deadlines, and those deadlines have meaning.  The Court issues a briefing schedule, and the brief needs to be filed on time. The Court doesn't care if you were having a bad day. The IRS wants your client's tax returns filed on time. Even if it's just your boss asking for a report or a speech on a certain date.  If you delay, they'll be late or unprepared for something they need to do, and now your advancement prospects don't look so great. I've had employees who could write the most beautiful documents, but they were never on time, so they were worthless to me. In many areas, speed and timeliness is just as important as content.  [/quote]

I'm a professor. I allow extensions. The argument PP makes above comes up far too often and it is mostly BS. The deadline examples you have given are for things that are generally long-term tasks where people are doing a job that they know how to do. Also, if the lawyer gets too ill, they do file paperwork to ask for an extension. If the tax return is for a large business, they've been working on it for months and while a few days or a week of illness isn't great, it's not going to mean the return is late.

Additionally, I worked in industry before I went back to get a PhD and become a professor. In the industry I worked in, if something wasn't going to be ready on time, you would say to your boss or client (in a nicer way than I'm saying here) "X isn't going to be done on Jan 11th,  However,  if we don't run into any snags, I believe it will be done by Jan 21st so we should plan for a meeting then".

I'm sure there are some speechwriters who have tight turn-arounds where they're expected to produce something in a matter of hours, but I think this is a rare type of job. Also, the person who takes that job probably knows the job duties will require them to work with quick turn-arounds regardless of circumstance.

Contrast that with a homework assignment I handed out on Monday, where you just learned the content last week (or on that very day), and I expect it to be turned in by Friday or the following Monday. I have to have some rules about extensions,  because eventually I do have to grade things and I have over 100 students (and for some classes over 200).  I don't want to be fishing out grading keys or having to grade a ton of assignments at the last minute. So for practical reasons, I don't allow endless extensions.  However, I do allow students to turn in work late and don't penalize them at all.

Also, for the person who complained that we make it too easy on the students by dropping their two lowest homework grades - have you never had an assignment you messed up?  I would love for the students to redo the assignment and turn it in again. However, that really is a nightmare to keep track of, so dropping the lowest couple grades seems sensible. [/quote]

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