6 ms·
> For example, my assignments are now largely due at midnight, at a very particular second: submit a nanosecond late at your own penalty. From the instructor's
by knzhou 7y ago
> For example, my assignments are now largely due at midnight, at a very particular second: submit a nanosecond late at your own penalty.
From the instructor's point of view, there's no winning here -- there will always be a cutoff, and any position of it will lead to complaints. Even for an informal system, there's always a last person allowed in, and hence a cutoff.
If you have a good reason for an extension, you can still get it. But there's no reason anybody needs, specifically, the extra second after a formal deadline. If the deadline were moved to a second after midnight, you would try to submit two seconds after midnight and complain, and so on. (I mean, why do you think deadlines are at midnight in the first place? Because in-person collection would stop working at 5 PM, leading to complaints, so deadlines were extended to midnight to let people work at night.)
This is pointless slippage, and the resolution from the student side is so easy. Just pretend every deadline is 5 minutes earlier than it actually is, and you'll never have problems.
- itronitron 7y agoSlippage is never pointless but rather an important aspect for any efficient system. If you are setting the deadline at midnight instead of 4pm then you are making most of the students work longer on the assignment. Set the hard deadline to 4pm and then allow a few students to submit late. That ends up being less of a burden on students and society.
- knzhou 7y agoThat’s not any different. Now how late are you allowed to submit? 5 PM? Sometime at night? Midnight? How many people are allowed to submit late? What if word gets out that everybody is allowed to? You get the exact same problem, except that more of the professor and TA’s time is wasted, and the whole process now has favoritism baked in. I have seen deadlines wrap all the way around a 24 hour cycle in this way. 5 PM is bad because people want to work at night, so delay to midnight. Well, people aren’t finishing, so delay to 5 AM, since everybody would be asleep then. Well now people are blaming you for “forcing” them to do all nighters, so delay to 9 AM. Now people say that’s unreasonable, because submitting later in the workday wouldn’t hurt anyone. So delay to 5 PM.
- Hextinium 7y agoThe only rebuttal to this that has been effective to a class is: if you see it at the day you ignore the time expecting it to be at 11:59PM. If I put it at 7 AM (to give you the whole night) the next day then you think it will be due at the end of the day so it is staying at 11:59PM.
- Spooky23 7y agoIt is different. By setting a deadline at midnight, you’re setting a tone that work is expected to happen then. In my undergraduate education, toxic behavior like this was common. One professor who was a particular asshole deliberately assigned onerous assignments to coincide with an assignment for another critical, difficult class that 75% of the students were taking. Academic hazing was pretty common in CS.
- userbinator 7y agoI've been an instructor for CS courses before so I know what you mean. I never made deadlines anything but absolutely final, which is appropriately not unlike a lot of other things in life --- from what I've heard from others, any leniency just tends to cause more whining. Someone who waits until the last second to do something is not going to do any better if given a tiny bit more time (nevermind the question of how much more?), and in any case procrastination is not a habit we want to encourage.
- defen 7y agoHow about having the student’s score decay as some function of how late they turn it in? If they turn it in before the deadline, they get 100% of their marked grade, if it’s an hour late 90%, a day late 50%, etc (use whatever function you want)
- knzhou 7y agoUsually, delays lead to logistical difficulties. Until every copy of an assignment is submitted, you can't release solutions, assign grades, talk about the problems in lectures or recitations, or really give any feedback whatsoever. I've had excellent courses that ran on your system, but in those cases they had it completely standardized from year to year, and even automated grading systems.
- Dylan16807 7y agoIf you're just trying to solve the bad feelings caused by a really hard deadline, you could do something as simple as "due at midnight, 80% credit from midnight to 6am". Then everyone's still done by class.
- lonelappde 7y agoThis issue only comes up if you have a low caliber class where homework is nontrivial part of the grade.
- 7y ago
- anigbrowl 7y agoI don't think you appreciate the basic point that many people do not wish to live in such a mechanistic and rigid society to begin with.
- knzhou 7y agoRules aren't made to make people miserable, they're made to keep things running for everybody involved.
- HarryHirsch 7y agoYes, that's the point. The reason that assignments are due on a certain day each week is that you've blocked out a certain afternoon of the week to go over the blasted things. If people routinely handed stuff in late then stuff would pile up, especially near the end of the semester, and the backup would interfere with the rest of your duties.
- snvzz 7y ago>Even for an informal system, there's always a last person allowed in, and hence a cutoff. Is there really? In my faculty, doors were kept open. I entered lectures at 20% of time left and nobody would bat an eyelid.
- iudqnolq 7y agoThey meant for turning in assignments.
- snvzz 7y agoOh. Hard deadline system with some conveniences. It was possible to upload the work multiple times, and for an hour or so after deathline, to select which of the uploaded copies would be the hand over. This allowed for e.g. uploading some code that works, and later progressively optimized/improved versions, without fear of uploading something partially broken by the end.