This post was mentioned on Twitter by ProfHacker: New @ProfHacker: “Developing Policies for Late Assignments,” by @DrNels http://bit.ly/oceHt...

There are some assignments I don’t accept late — tutorial response papers are due on the day they’re due, full-stop. Since they can drop the lowest 2 out of 7, it’s not onerous in my mind.

However I find this is only practical with small classes, since otherwise I end up with way too much grading at the end of term.

In classes with problem sets where I want to work the problems later in class one can’t accept anything late. I usually point this out to students so that they understand why I am inflexible about it.

The way I work it is this: Let’s say a paper is due Tuesday the 1st. I dock a grade’s worth (B to B-) for every day past that that it is late, so a C+ paper turned in Thursday would earn a C- after the penalty. The docking continues down until the paper reaches a numerical F (50%) and will not earn anything lower than that. Given that an assignment that isn’t turned in at all gets 0%, there’s an incentive to turn in something, eventually.

To avoid the late penalties, the students have two options: 1) Turn in a hard copy the day the assignment is due. 2) Email me a copy, which will stop the penalty clock. If they turn in a hard copy by the end of the next class, I will count it as having been turned in on the day it was emailed. If they don’t remember the hard copy, then the full late penalty applies, dating from the day that the hard copy is turned in.

The second option, I explain to them, is not to give them extra time on the assignment, but to allow them to avoid late penalties if for some reason they are unable to get a hard copy to me on time. (Printer troubles, too sick to come to class, etc.)

Students who turn in work late do have an opportunity to remove the late penalty – I give all students the opportunity to revise assignments, averaging the grades of the revision and original. If a student who turned in a late paper revises it, I will use the pre-penalty grade on the draft for the average, not the grade with penalty applied.

Basically, I want to deter students as much as possible from turning work in late, while not making it so punitive that students just give up if they miss a deadline.

My logic – which I will explain if they ask – is that it’s not fair to me, or their peers, to submit work late. It increases and complicates my workload, it may give them an advantage (in terms of new information) that their peers didn’t have, it ties up classes in which we discuss each others’ work, and it messes up schedules that I carefully arranged so as to ensure that the work was spaced out and coordinated with the readings.

That said, I also have the policy that late work is better than no work, so there’s always a spate of long-neglected things showing up the last day of class. Those all get automatic numerical Fs, and no comments (other than a note about how late they are) – but it’s still better than 0s.