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.