I was supposed to e-mail the paper to my teacher at midnight, but I didn’t know we were supposed to e-mail and I wasn’t quite sure if it was the midnight of or the midnight before, and there was no info posted online (though he did talk about it in class), so I e-mailed asking. He replied back saying “Email. Now”, but I didn’t check the e-mail until after midnight like 40 mins later, so I submitted my paper an hour late basically. I literally finished my paper two hours before the deadline but didn’t know what do with it, now I’ve stupidly submitted it late. My question is, do professors generally take off points from your paper if you submit it an hour late? He seems pretty lenient with deadlines btw since we do online submissions for assignments every week and people are always a little bit late with them. I’m always early on assignments, and I even went to his office hours to discuss and get advice on the paper like days before so its not as if I’m a perpetual slacker. This is a small class btw with only like 15 people so its only him who grades and reads.
Your story doesn’t quite make sense. You thought you had a midnight deadline. You emailed the prof. But then you didn’t check your email until after midnight??? And your paper was finished two hours before, but you apparently didn’t want to turn it in early???
Deadlines are part of the assignment, and giving you extra time in effect penalizes everyone else who managed to get their assignment in on time. So, yes, you should be docked points.
Check the class syllabus to see how much of a penalty there is on work that is turned in late. And then next time plan ahead.
@MidwestDad3 No no no. The paper was due Tuesday, I knew that for a fact. I e-mailed the professor at 10:32PM Monday night asking him when we should submit it and how. He replied back at 11:48PM saying “Email. Now”. I didn’t check my e-mail until almost an hour later, so I sent the paper to him at 12:43AM. I finished the paper at 10:30 but wasn’t sure how he wanted it, and whether or not it even was due that night. Otherwise, I could have spent another day going over it again in case it wasn’t actually due. Why would I submit a paper potentially 24 hours early?
And like I said, the professor is normally lenient with assignment deadlines, though I don’t know if that leniency varies when its an online homework assignment vs. a 5-page paper. People ordinarily submit online assignments late and he never has a problem with them.
There’s nothing in the syllabus about turning papers late.
@MidwestDad3 Also, typically for paper assignments we would submit them in person, so I wasn’t sure if he were supposed to hand him a physical copy or what. He didn’t make an announcement or an e-mail about this though nor did he specify anywhere whether it was due midnight on Monday or midnight on Tuesday, though I’m sure he talked about it in class. He’s a pretty chill professor though and knows I’m not a slacker
Its not as if I submitted the paper days late and wanted extra time with it, I was literally 43 minutes late. How exactly does that “penalize everyone else who managed to get their assignment in on time”.
Well, 43 minutes late at the airport means you miss your flight. So minutes do matter.
Your teacher shouldn’t make a practice of being “lenient” on homework, and the consequences of being late should be spelled out in writing. And to answer your question, you turn in the paper when it is finished in order to get it off your plate and not have to worry about being late!
Good luck. Maybe he’ll cut you some slack. But next time you ask about a midnight deadline and your assignment is already finished, check your email a few minutes before to see whether the prof has gotten back to you.
@MidwestDad3 I mean if it was done by an automated system I would know minutes matter, but this was human to human email. Typically that entails a grace period of some sort
This class is a history class and is more chill and discussion based, with only 15 people in it, which is why I think he’s lenient when it comes to assignments and is more concerned with our progression in the class. I realize I should have took far more discretion concerning this situation, like checking my email earlier. He likely will cut me some slack especially since I’m usually early when it comes to submitting assignments and never late, but I’m still a little bit worried
So what do you expect strangers on the Internet to do to help with this? Some profs will dock you, some won’t. Check the syllabus. That is really all you can do.
I’m not sure what answer you’re looking for. No one here knows if your professor will dock you points, and it doesn’t matter what any other professor does. You seem pretty confident that you won’t lose points (you’ve repeatedly commented on how he’s “chill” and “lenient”) and seem insistent that that’s the right answer (that you are “entailed” to a “grace period”). It doesn’t really matter whether that is true or not. There’s nothing you can do about it now. The professor will either dock you points (which he has every right to do because your assignment was late) or he won’t. We don’t know what he will do, and all you can do is make sure you aren’t late in the future so that you don’t have to worry about this again.
I disagree that your entitled to a grace period. If anything, I would think email would make it even easier to hold people to a deadline–everything is time-stamped so there are no arguments about when it was submitted, you generally don’t have to travel anywhere to turn the assignment in, no issues with printing or whatnot, etc. My recommendation would be to stop making excuses for why you were late and why the professor shouldn’t take off points, and just move on with your life.
For future reference, I think you should have just sent the paper at 10:32 p.m. without asking any questions. 
You might have been on time and you might have been a day late, but either way the paper should have been submitted. I don’t think you’re entitled to a grace period, but you probably won’t lose that many points (if you lose any at all) and I wouldn’t worry about it. Forty-three minutes late won’t result in the same point deduction as three days late.
One reason you aren’t getting a lot of sympathy is that emailing a prof after 10 at night is really late when the paper may or may not be due by midnight. If you were unsure of the due date, the time to ask would have been days earlier. My guess is that he said in class when it was due, and probably also discussed how to turn work in the first week of class. But you didn’t pick up that info for whatever reason. Now you want sympathy for a last minute snafu, when you also didn’t keep an eye on your email when you thought it might be due at midnight.
I don’t understand. Why did you wait until 12:43 to check your email when 12:00 could have been/was the deadline? I would’ve made it a point to check my email before midnight if the deadline was midnight. I wouldn’t even really expect a response from a professor at 10:30 at night.
Either they’ll be a standard penalty or there won’t be. If it were me, I wouldn’t be grading papers at 11:59 or at 12:43 I’d be asleep. So an hour either way would be irrelevant.
I also am a bit confused. The deadline for the paper should be on the syllabus. If it’s Tuesday, then you got it in on time. His curt “Email. Now” might have reflected some minor irritation on his part for being emailed at a relatively late hour. Regardless, what’s done is done. I would recommend not importuning him further and take whatever penalty is coming. I suspect the penalty will be minor (maybe 10%) if there’s no standard policy listed on the syllabus.
Out of curiosity I looked up “midnight” on Wikipedia. If I am understanding correctly, midnight is an ambiguous term that does not actually belong to either day, but it is the exact moment that falls between two days.
Professors should be careful if they assign a paper to be due at midnight on a day in the future: “midnight on October 24th,” for example, causes confusion. However, “get it to me tonight by midnight” would be sufficiently clear. This is why some insurance policies end at 11:59 p.m. on October 24th. Or start at 12:01 a.m. on October 25th. (Don’t get injured during those two seconds–you might not be covered!)
So yes, on this count @MetroBoominWantS has my sympathy. The professor is asking for trouble with such an ambiguity. And a professor should never depart from the syllabus without putting a change clearly in writing.
Last, some students rarely email. If I want to reach my daughter at college, she responds very quickly to a text. But if I email her, it might be days before I hear back. Good luck, OP. I hope the sanction (if any) is not severe.
I agree that midnight can be confusing, but that’s why I always ask immediately for clarification of the deadline, rather than waiting until 1.5 hours before.
While, yes, this is confusing, the time to ask the question is days before the deadline or even when the assignment was first given. Unless the assignment was given that very night, there would have been time to ask. It also sounds like the professor discussed how to submit the assignment and perhaps when, as well in class (perhaps because other students were asking for clarification). That would have been the time for the OP to write down this information so that they had it for future reference, and if it was unclear, that would have been the time to ask about it. The professor’s terse response suggests to me either that he was annoyed to be answering questions this late at night or maybe he was annoyed at answering the question after it had already been discussed in class.
But instead of asking for clarifications on the deadline and how the assignment should be submitted early, the OP asked at the last minute and was lucky to get a response from a professor after 10:30 at night. If they never received a response (or didn’t get one until the next day at a reasonable hour), would have just not submitted the assignment until the next day? And even though they knew the deadline was potentially at midnight, they still checked their email AFTER midnight. I would think at the very least you would have checked your email before midnight. I would have probably submitted it before midnight even if I didn’t get a response, just in case.
I might not have the whole story, but it sounds to me like the OP is in the situation because they were careless. That doesn’t really garner my sympathy.
12:00 a.m. is midnight and is the start of the first minute of the day. Thus, 12:00 a.m. Tuesday means the rest of Tuesday is still ahead of you, and Wednesday begins in exactly 24 hours. It can be ambiguous, though, so you need to clarify with the prof.
You’re lucky he was even up and answering email at midnight.
I think it should be ok because email is imperfect. But you should ask all these questions up front next time.
Right, midnight is 12:00 am, one minute before 12:01 am. We go through this all the time when college apps are due by midnight. “Midnight is…the moment when the date changes.” Monday changes to Tuesday at 12:00 am. Think of it as: 12:00:01 is obviously the next calendar day.
At any rate, next time ask in advance and have the paper done before 10:30 pm. If you have to contest some late penalty, I’d advise you have something better to say than you don’t know when midnight is.
@brantly I’m curious for your source. Most counting begins with one, and ends in zero. I think that the day begins at 00:00:01 on European time, and would end precisely at 24:00:00, which is midnight. Most people take “meet me Tuesday at midnight” to mean meet me after Tuesday has occurred, at 12 midnight.
There was similar confusion as the world counted down to the millennium. Should it begin on 1 Jan 2000, or 1 Jan 2001?
@lookingforward Midnight is also one minute after 11:59 p.m.