OnlineProfessor

Imagine this: it’s the last week of the term, and you’ve realized that you’re on the verge of failing because you skipped some of the major assignments earlier in the class. So, you ask your instructor if you could just submit them all now. The professor says no. Why?

Here’s what such a last-minute request looks like from the instructor’s perspective:

• This student has got to be kidding. Think about this. Imagine that you’re part of a group project and you’ve done all your work on time. But some procrastinating team member waits until the last minute and creates a stressful situation for everyone else in the group. Well, that’s how it appears to the instructor. Your professor has been doing his or her part the entire term, and for a student to come along during the last week and expect the instructor to stay up late and grade several assignments at the last minute is, quite honestly, rude.
• There is too little time. Instructors get an astonishingly short period of time at the end of every term to tabulate and submit final grades. It is the worst time of the term for every instructor because the workload quadruples and the deadlines are halved. They barely have enough time to grade the timely final projects, and there is hardly time to eat.
• This isn’t fair to the other students. Most instructors keep fairness at the top of their minds. They know that if they accept one student’s late work, they should really accept the entire class’ late work, at least for that particular project. And so, if they say no to you, they’re really saying no to at least a dozen others just like you waiting in the wings.
• The late work will probably be very poor in quality. Experience shows that late work submitted by students at the last minute is usually, to be blunt, total junk. The student is rushing through many final assignments for several classes, trying desperately to get some points. And late work handed in at this stage is usually a haphazard, incomplete, disjointed mess. And such incoherent projects always take longer to grade than the polished, stronger student submissions. And so it’s a double whammy for instructors. And so, the experienced ones avoid such abuse by simply saying no.

Contrary to many students’ beliefs, instructors do not take joy in declining student requests. It’s simply a matter of limited resources. There is only one instructor and several dozen (sometimes several hundred) students. If you’re lucky, you have a graduate student helper, but that’s about it.

So, get your work done on time throughout the term, and know that you’ll get a better overall experience from it.

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