Tuesday, December 15, 2020

A Little Quiz

This is a quiz for all the educators in these trying times.

Situation: a student reaches out to you and says their parent/grandparent/other relative is sick or has died. They say their work and/or paper may be late as a result.

Do you

(1) Reply with an agreement to accept late work if the student provides documentation, such as a note from the doctor or a copy of an obituary

(2) Refuse to accept late work. The student will have to work around their personal problems. This is the Real World, after all.

(3) Make a joke about how many grandparents die near finals.

(4) Reply with sympathy to both the student and their family, and tell the student to take as much time as they need. Assure them that you will help in any way you can.


I know I was told, while a graduate students, that (1) or (2) was the correct answer. But honestly, if people are still doing this, maybe rethink your position.


13 comments:

nicoleandmaggie said...

I can't imagine doing anything other than 4. I'm always a little weirded out when they provide documentation in the email.

delagar said...

Right?!

A said...

Yeah, 4 always. At this point, after this semester, I’m also accepting “I forgot to hit submit” as a valid reason.

delagar said...


Right? This semester especially, I'd take late work for any reason or no reason.

Jenny F. Scientist said...

I took late work from one (the same) student twice last semester, but the reason was "I was so busy". The third time I gave them a zero. This was a 20-point weekly quiz which they had three full days to complete, including a weekend, and the excuse was that they had waited until the last minute and then run out of time. Also, the lowest grade got automatically dropped for everyone. If someone had been ill I would have been much more sympathetic! (The college also has a whole process for that so that I need not adjudicate it.) As it was...

delagar said...

Yeah, that does seem different.

I do mostly take late work, but idk that I would if a student *continually* turned in late work, with the excuse that they were too busy to do their work for my class.

Jenny F. Scientist said...

My mother likes to say "after three weeks it's not a crisis, it's a way of life."

Jenny F. Scientist said...

Oh, I forgot to say, they also sent me a pitiful (and also manipulative) email about how they HOPED I would be FLEXIBLE AND UNDERSTANDING in this uniquely difficult semester and I was like "I was? Which is why you do not have three zeros?"

delagar said...

"....it's not a crisis, it's a way of life."

Exactly.

Three or four semesters ago, B.C., I had a student come to my office hours. They had only attended one class in the entire first month of class, had turned in no work at all, and they said they were hoping I would understand. They were working two jobs, they were a single parent with three children -- and all of these children played multiple sports or were involved in acting or marching band -- and they also were very active in their church. They just did not have time to come to class.

I had all the sympathy in the world, mind you, but no, I was not passing a student who didn't have time to do the work.

nicoleandmaggie said...

For homework assignments, I'm actually pretty harsh. I can't make more work for my TAs with late assignments AND the students get the solutions to the problem set a week after they turn it in. My general flexibility is: if the TA hasn't started grading it yet, you can get it to them if there's been an emergency, but otherwise this will count as one of your TWO dropped problem sets for the semester. But each individual problem set isn't worth much (as a whole they're worth a lot) and the two dropped set policy is pretty generous. It would be less generous if I were willing to deal with smaller emergencies. Papers and exams etc. are more responsive to emergencies because it's only my scheduling that's being upset and I don't have to hold up an entire class from getting solutions. (Students taking the exam late just do a randomly chosen previous year's exam so I don't have to make unique exams for emergency people.)

delagar said...

That's more or less my policy with missed quizzes -- if they see me about the problem beforehand, I can give them the quiz in my office. Otherwise, it counts as one of the three dropped quiz grades for the semester.

And the quizzes are such a small part of the grade, individually, that missing a few doesn't hurt them much, overall.

Athena Andreadis said...

Loss of a parent is in a different category from the rest and requires more leeway. As a professor I fell into the "trust but verify" group. Lastly, the extension cannot be infinite no matter what the specifics: there's an external deadline for delivering the grades, and other people (students, TAs, etc) involved.

delagar said...


Right, the end of the semester is the hard deadline. Though our university does have the option of giving Incompletes, we're only supposed to use those for students who run into trouble in the last weeks of class.