Flexible Deadlines

I use flexible deadlines for a lot of assignments since the pandemic began, and not just for the sake of compassion.

I started using flexible deadlines in my courses during the pandemic for reasons that are probably obvious. Students were struggling with the move to online courses, as well as with family and work responsibilities, illness, stress, and exhaustion. I started giving “target dates” (the date students should shoot for) and “last day accepted” dates (LDA; the last day I’ll accept the assignment for full credit). My experiences early on with flexible deadlines were really positive, and so I’ve continued to use them for all individual assignments in all of my classes, typically giving students 1-2 weeks of flextime on each assignment. I do not use flexible deadlines for groupwork, as students need to be accountable to one another in terms of deadlines. With groupwork, being late may negatively impact the performance of other students, whereas with individual assignments the impact is relatively self-contained. I explain this deadline system and its rationale to students on the syllabus and in class.

Aside from being compassionate during times when my students are struggling, there are a bunch of other benefits to using flexible deadlines:

1.     The quality of student work has improved. Students who might have submitted work only partially done, or failed to submit at all, now have an opportunity to complete the work. This is a virtuous cycle. When students receive low grades early on in the semester, it often saps them of energy and enthusiasm, and contributes to lower grades throughout. Sometimes students withdraw from the course if they get too many poor grades early on. There are many students in my classes who just need another day or two to finish up and who do excellent work. I like that I don’t have to penalize students for late work as often, and am finding that the quality and consistency of student work has improved with the implementation of flexible deadlines. Students’ spirits are also higher. Receiving a D on something you worked hard on, and that is of good quality, merely because it was 24 hours late can be demoralizing.

I understand that some faculty see hard deadlines as a way of holding students accountable, and of ensuring that they learn how to meet deadlines. “There are deadlines in the real world, in any workplace, so students should get used to them.” I’ve heard versions of this before from colleagues. I mostly agree. Except that I’ve found that many of my students haven’t been taught how to meet deadlines, how to manage their time, and how to manage larger and more independent projects. Meeting deadlines is important, but it requires skill, skill that many students have not yet had an opportunity to practice and refine.

2.     Flexible deadlines provide a lower-stakes/lower-risk environment for working on time and project management skills. I combine flexible deadlines with work on relevant skill development. I work with students on using schedules and calendars, on time management techniques like the Pomodoro Method, on setting goals and making plans to reach those goals, and on managing large projects using techniques like chunking and task prioritization. When students know that they have a bit of flextime to help with experimentation—i.e., such that, if the experiment fails, they still have some time to complete a given assignment—I’ve found they are more willing to experiment, because failure is less costly/risky.

3.     There are also big administrative benefits to using flexible deadlines. Rather than getting a giant pile of assignments that I have to grade in cram sessions that make me feel awful, with flexible deadlines I instead get assignments submitted by students on a rolling basis. Some students take advantage of the flextime, while others do not. Some students need only an extra day, while others take the full two weeks allowed. This means that I get, say, 3 assignments on a Monday, 4 more on Wednesday, 7 on Friday, and then the remainder over the next week. This allows me to focus on grading only a few assignments each time I sit down to grade. Grading is thus a lot less stressful because I can focus my energies on just a handful of students at a time. I can put aside a couple of hours a day for maybe 3 days each week and stay up to date on my grading; I can “fit grading in” to my busy schedule with more ease.

With this system, I’m also finding I comment more substantively for each student because I’m not grading the same assignment 40 times in row until I’m exhausted. I also turn around homework more quickly than I used to, on average, because I grade them more or less as they come in. Whereas in the past, it would sometimes take me 3 weeks to get comments back on a stack of assignments, I now take only 1-2 weeks. This helps me because I do a better job with less stress and exhaustion and helps students because they get more timely and helpful feedback.