Academic vs. Administrative Penalties for Late Assignments

Introduction

In education, assignments are the foundation of both learning and assessment. Research has shown that assignments are correlated with academic success as well as with the development of time management skills and a greater sense of personal accomplishment (Anderman, 1998). Assignments allow students to practice new concepts and permit the teacher to evaluate student work in order to identify areas that need attention or to revisit material the class has not yet mastered (Corbin & Holt, 2002, p. 121). Assignments also provide test preparation and promote long-term recall of new material (Doyle, 1990).

Background and the Problem with Academic Penalties

Being a student and being required to complete assignments have gone hand in hand since most students began kindergarten. The problem is that not every student completes or turns in their assignments on time (Mitchell & Salsbury, 2002, p. 45). From the start of formal education to the present day, teachers have often struggled with students not handing in assignments on time. Although formal education has existed for well over a hundred years, there is still no solid consensus as to what works best to motivate high school students to complete their work (Alderman, 2004, p. 279). Many efforts have been made to encourage timely submission, from rewards such as candy to giving only half credit or zeros for late work (Hong & Milgram, 2000, p. 120).

At the school studied, missing work has become a major problem that is deeply affecting failure rates, dropout rates, and increasing student apathy toward assignments. The researcher conducted a brief survey to find out how five different teachers in the same department handled late work; the five teachers questioned provided four different answers. Two stated their students received only half credit for late work. When those same five teachers were asked whether their own university instructors had ever recommended a method of handling student late work, the answer was uniformly "no" — none had ever been given any guidance on the problem of late assignments. Teachers have been forced to devise their own approaches, to experiment with what works, or simply to adopt whatever a colleague does for the sake of simplicity.

The true history behind the 50% rule is straightforward: a teacher can apply the penalty easily without a calculator. As a result, one of the most common penalties for late work is reducing a student's grade by 50% for each assignment that is a day or more late (Corno, 1996). No comparable standard exists outside of education. In construction, fines are incurred for a late project, but the road itself is not judged to be half as well built. If an office presentation is late, an employee may be reprimanded, written up, or even fired — but they are not given half credit for the work itself. If a mortgage payment is one day late, a late fee is charged, but the borrower does not receive only half the value of the payment; it would be illegal to impose such a severe financial penalty. In real-life situations, people receive administrative penalties for late or missing work — not a reduction of credit for work that has been completed.

A second serious issue caused by half-credit or no-credit policies is the removal of any incentive to complete the work at all (Pilcher, 1994, pp. 81–83). Why would a student invest time in an assignment when the highest possible grade they can earn is a failing 50%? Missing assignments become zeros in the grade book, and students' grades plummet (Singer, 2003, pp. 204–207). Plummeting grades lead to increased course failures, which may contribute to the sense of disengagement that can ultimately drive a higher dropout rate (Lindsay, 1995; Santisteban et al., 1996, p. 39). The current methods teachers use to encourage timely submission — academic penalties — are not congruent with the real-world workplace for which students are being prepared. Reducing academic credit due to lateness actually deters students from handing in work at all. As educators, more must be done to encourage students to submit complete, on-time work without resorting to academic penalties that are counterproductive to learning.

The problem of late assignments is not easily solved. Many students will submit work beyond its due date despite severe academic penalties such as half credit. For many more, the threat of half credit is a disincentive to complete the assignment at all — a fact that leads to unnecessary zeros and to students falling further behind academically. Failure in one class may cause a student to lose interest in others, and poor academic performance can equal a loss of desire to achieve, or even to try. The young man or woman may ultimately leave school as a dropout. Academic penalties are not the answer. We must understand the problem in order to address it.

Review of the Literature

Traditionally, teachers have attacked the problem of late assignments by providing a clear disincentive to turn work in late: overdue work automatically receives a significantly lower grade than on-time work, regardless of student effort or achievement. Most commonly, the grade given equals fifty percent of what would have been awarded for timely work — a figure chosen not for any instructional benefit to the student, but because it was the easiest for the teacher to calculate. Imposing a rule solely for the instructor's convenience violates one of the classic precepts of education: the direction of classroom experience so as to enable students to achieve their learning goals (Singer, 2003, p. 36). Education should be a constructive process. Palincsar argues that the teacher must assume an active and directive role by establishing the pace, content, and goals of the lesson (Palincsar, 1998). Byra similarly described a process of "task progression" through which content is broken down and sequenced into meaningful learning experiences (Byra, 2004). The lesson learned from receiving fifty percent credit on a late assignment is not necessarily the lesson intended.

Each step in the academic process contributes to learning. An assignment is not merely research, nor merely a grade — it is the sum total of the student's entire experience in relation to that learning moment (Bailey, Hughes & Moore, 2004, p. 32). A student who receives a grade of fifty percent because he or she completed an assignment late sees that arbitrary judgment of their work as a "lesson" too. Studies show that the difficulty encountered in such a task-request approach — completing the assignment and then receiving a fifty percent grade — is viewed as an arbitrary situational cue that tends to produce a pattern of shortcut behaviors characterized by low organization (Lehtinen, 1995, p. 26). A primary aim of assignment completion becomes the avoidance of academic penalties rather than genuine learning. Students lose sight of the real purpose of their assignments and with it the motivation necessary to complete work on time (Evertson & Smithey, 2000, p. 294). This muddling of purpose can carry over into other spheres of life, potentially affecting the young person's future performance in the workplace. A common complaint regarding young workers is that they do not seem to understand how to behave at work, lack a work ethic, and do not know what is expected of them (Rhoder & French, 1999, p. 534).

Clarity of purpose is especially important in today's school environment. Like many institutions, schools across the United States serve increasingly diverse student populations drawn from a variety of ethnic, racial, and religious backgrounds. Students' perceptions of their teachers are as important as their understanding of core academic content. African American students often feel they are not being given the same consideration as white students and that they learn little or nothing of value during their high school years (Banks, 2005). To illustrate the importance of meaningful school exercises, Jessie Singer and Ruth Shagoury Hubbard devised an experiment in which high school seniors pushed the boundaries of literary exploration by designing their own writing projects (Singer & Hubbard, 2002). Students were instructed to write about their passions — clothing, animals, children, comic books, and so forth. The lesson these two educators drew from the experience was that students invest far more effort in projects that are meaningful to them, and the project also enabled students to see the relationship between a basic skill such as writing and things of great personal interest beyond the classroom door.

The relationship between material learned in school and the skills needed to acquire that information can be demonstrated in other ways as well. Murata found that block scheduling could create cohesive learning communities out of large, ethnically and racially diverse student populations. Block classes group courses according to common themes, forming a single, larger course or program. Research has shown that this integration of material across disciplinary lines serves to increase student achievement, enhance critical thinking skills, and improve the overall school climate while fostering a collaborative style of both learning and teaching — and, importantly, a more diverse, inclusive, and relevant curriculum that encourages students to think and learn for themselves (Weller & McLeskey, 2000, p. 209). High schools that have adopted block scheduling have seen a rise in graduation rates and a reduction in disciplinary incidents (Queen, 2000, p. 214). The concept raises academic performance while seamlessly providing students with everyday examples of cooperative problem solving, personal and joint responsibility, and mutual understanding. The group ethos engendered by block programs allows professionals and students from diverse backgrounds — with a wide range of knowledge and life experience — to come together, offer emotional support, and design behavioral systems more attuned to the real needs of the school community (Vitello & Mithaug, 1998, p. 49). Properly constructed behavioral systems eliminate many of the barriers to learning that arise when discipline is poor or absent. The group approach also teaches culturally sensitive pro-social skills (Utley, Kozleski, Smith & Draper, 2002), helping students to respect the behavior and opinions of others and to understand why different individuals act and think as they do.