The Real Reason Students Miss Assignment Deadlines.
1. The e-mail is always sent at 2:14 AM.
Oh Professor, I’m so sorry to have to report on this late, but my Wi-Fi has been down, my laptop had a fire, and I’ve had a sudden, extremely violent 24-hour stomach bug….” If you are a teacher, you’ve heard a thousand times. For students, you will have written one with sweaty palms and a racing heart. There has been a long tradition of the moral bookkeeping involved with missed deadlines. Some people know how to manage their time “responsibly”, who are doing just that, and then there are the students who are “lazy” or “disorganised”, who simply need to purchase a planner. But no one who has ever sat across from a lazy student would ever think it was laziness; in fact, it is a myth. Don’t blame the student when they don’t submit assignments on time; they are not being lazy, etc. It’s not like their internet connection went down at 11:59 PM. The true motivations are much more complex, profoundly psychological, and are embedded in the very fabric of the modern educational system.
To overcome the deadline dilemma, we need to look at the human brain, rather than planners. Perils of “Productive Procrastination” If a student asks the question, ‘What did you do on Sunday night?’, and the answer is ‘I went partying’, you can be sure it was not the last thing they had checked out of the school library on Sunday night. Most frequently, they were doing laundry, tidying their desk, cleaning the kitchen or reading other articles for another class. What psychologists refer to as ‘productive procrastination’.
The problem with procrastination is not a time-management issue; it’s a problem with controlling your emotions. A mild threat response is triggered in the brain when an assignment feels overwhelming, ambiguous, and/or high stakes. That 10-page research paper gets to the amygdala (emotional centre of the brain), and it tells you “danger! danger!”. The student tries to diminish that anxiety by attempting to get rid of it or to make the hurt or pain go away. When you tidy up the study space or create a colour-coded study guide, you get a quick surge of dopamine and a feeling of accomplishment. They feel as if they were working, but they’re simply evading the feelings of distress with their primary duty. When they can cope with their anxiousness and sit down to work on the paper, it is too late.
2. The Perfectionism Paralysis.
There’s a huge paradox in education – it’s the students who care the most, who turn things in the latest. We view perfectionism as a positive trait in our personality, but it is, in fact, a fear of being average. If the blank page is an assignment to perfectionism, it won’t simply be an assignment; it will be a mirror that will show the value of a human being.
Perfectionist’s Trait #1: “If I don’t do my best and I don’t get it right, I’m dumb; if I wait till the night before, I have an excuse: I wasn’t stupid, I was just short of time. Self-handicapping is called as such.
It is an unconsciously activated form of defense which is meant to safeguard a student’s self-esteem. With all the pressure to come up with some amazing piece of writing, you can’t write anything. They rewrite the first sentence twenty times, and after failing to find the words, they give up and simply give up by the deadline because they are too exhausted to come up with anything new.
Examine the role of the ‘Vague Prompt’ in overcoming executive dysfunction. In some cases, the blocker has nothing to do with the emotion; it’s the thinking.
All humans have a set of mental abilities known as executive functioning. This encompasses working memory, flexible thinking and self-control. It’s the method that enables us to see a large project and break it down into small bits and define those small bits on a calendar. The problem is that the part of the brain that handles executive functioning, that is, the part that controls decisions, judgment and reasoning, doesn’t fully develop until a person hits their mid-twenties. If a professor assigns an essay prompt, such as “Analyse economic changes in the 19th century,” a seasoned academic is already familiar with the steps that go into writing such an essay. To any undergraduate or high school student, however, that’s a monolith
. They are unable to go from reading the prompt to writing the essay. They can’t see the first step, and so they will not execute the first step. They wait for inspiration and do not realise that inspiration comes through action, not the other way round! We tend to think of the “traditional” student: a student who is given to a single task: studying in the old-fashioned way—going to class, reading leather-bound books in a quiet library and drinking coffee.
That student isn’t very much of a student these days. Today’s students have an unprecedented cognitive and physical burden: The Financial Squeeze: A significant portion of students work part-time and/or full-time in order to pay for groceries and tuition. They are experiencing a digital environment that is designed to capture their attention. The Chronically Fragmented Mind:
They are living in a digital world that is deliberately breaking their attention. Four hours of focus, no distractions required, is a huge mental exertion, and not everyone has the energy for it at the end of a 10-hour day of work and classes. The “All-or-Nothing” Syllabus: Frequently, assignments are grouped. If I were three different professors, and I scheduled my midterm and papers for Week 8, then we’ll just have to see how that works out. Students are literally playing “triage” and are making a conscious effort to make a grade choice that involves letting the A go to save the B. But how to get over the “Late Policy”? The typical way that teachers have traditionally reacted has been to increase the pressure – more points off for late assignments, no late work rules, or “locking” turn-in portals at midnight. Ruthlessness isn’t an antidote for anxiety, and, not the best executive functioning lesson.
It simply inculcates a survival mentality in students to submit rushed, AI-created, or plagiarised papers. Restructuring the assignment of work is needed if we want to help the students meet deadlines. Giving students a 20-page prompt on the first day and expecting that to be completed in two months.Scaffolding: Standards of success written down on the paper (Topic proposal in Week 2, Outline in Week 4, First Draft in Week 6).Policies that instil fear, “Zero Tolerance”.
Grace Days: Allotting extension days (3) for each semester without asking any questions.Grace Days: Allowing students a “bank” of 3 days without questions per semester to deal with friction in life.Lacking instructions that are clear and have previously been explained.Explicit Rubrics: Giving very detailed information on what the first step is, including examples of past successful work. Let’s not assume that a student is a shirker or doesn’t care about the rules the next time he is tardy.
Let’s not assume a lack of character the next time a student is late. Let’s not begin to despair of laziness. Rather, check out the fear of failure. See the overwhelming unseen step. Find someone after the student who has one retail job that requires him to work 6 hours and another job he didn’t have, in which he stood for 3 hours. Deadlines are important since there are deadlines in the real world. Yet, like in the real world, being empathetic, communicating and being flexible are also key traits. We don’t just get better essays, we get better essays when we approach a missed assignment as a chance to work on emotional control and project management – not a chance to punish. We strengthen humans to withstand adversity.
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