3 ms·

Slippage 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 mak

Slippage 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 ago
That’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 ago
  The 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 ago
  It 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.

knzhou 7y ago

That’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 ago
The 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 ago
It 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.