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Some context: I was intrigued by a short discussion in another answer relating to dealing with late submissions of work by students, where Jeff suggested giving students a limited number of 12-hour "late tokens" that they can use at their discretion when submitting work late during a course. The idea of this is to give each student a "budget" for lateness, so that mild sporadic lateness would be okay, but repeated or extreme lateness would break the budget. This seems like a very clever idea to me. Hence, the purpose of this question is to solicit information on any other unusual/innovative practices lecturers use to deal with late submissions of assessment in their courses.

Question: What kinds of unusual/innovative methods do lecturers use to deal with late submission of assessment?

Ben
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In an effort to avoid whining and prolong the lives of grandmothers, I experimented with giving students a bank of "late days" which they could use to defer submission of homework. In an effort to teach some time management, I made the students responsible for telling me that they intended to use late days before the due date of the assignment.

That did not work. "I'm sorry my assignment was late, but...." turned into "I'm sorry I didn't tell you I was going to use late days, but..."

Bob Brown
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  • Ben, who posted the question, also used a bank of "late time," in 12-hour increments if I remember correctly. The difference is that he automatically subtracted from the student's bank until it was exhausted. That avoids the problem I had. The downside I see to that is that a student who completely overlooks an assignment will unknowingly exhaust their bank. – Bob Brown Dec 02 '20 at 23:46
  • And, my comment gave credit incorrectly. It was Jeff, not Ben, who posted that idea. Sorry! – Bob Brown Dec 02 '20 at 23:58
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    There's a simple workaround (for the professor) to prevent the issue of unknowingly exhausting the bank — deduct tokens only after an assignment is submitted late, not as soon as the deadline passes. – GoodDeeds Dec 03 '20 at 14:38
  • @GoodDeeds Well, duh! Of course, and thank you! – Bob Brown Dec 03 '20 at 23:15
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My father tells of a class he took at Harvard Business School where the weekly case study write up was submitted through a mail slot in the department office, falling into a basket. At 5PM on Saturday, it was the janitor's job to push the basket away from the slot. On Monday morning, if your paper was on the floor you got a personal invitation to visit with the professor.

One result was two students getting in a fender-bender out front of the building at 4:50pm, each leaping out of their car to race in and drop their assignment in the slot, before going back outside to argue about who was at fault.

Perhaps not the best practice...

Jon Custer
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