My university cs department (most of them, anyway) used a system I liked very much: - Due dates are hard (usually midnight) - Everyone gets 3 "emergency token

My university cs department (most of them, anyway) used a system I liked very much: - Due dates are hard (usually midnight) - Everyone gets 3 "emergency tokens", which give you a 24 hour extension on the assignment, no questions asked. Max 2 per assignment. - On occasion, you could get an extension without using a token by speaking to the professor in advance, if you had extenuating circumstances. It was a good compromise between meaningful deadlines and humanity. One particular advantage is that, if you missed the midnight deadline, you knew you were using a town anyway, so there was no pressure to sacrifice sleep to get the assignment in "on time". Most people I knew were happy with it.