<p>I remember a show I saw where a lawyer realized that she needed to file some kind of motion for a BIG CLIENT in the courts, but the deadline was at 5pm and she had missed it. She about had a heart attack, because in the real world, missing a deadline actually could be the end of the world from a professional standpoint, and there are many situations where you can pout all you want, yet the deadline is a deadline. Career over.</p>
<p>In a funny twist, this lawyer actually was very resourceful, and managed to file her motion on time, because she filed in Honolulu, which as we all know, is several hours earlier than New York. When she called her nemesis to report that she had successfully filed the motion, HE had the heart attack.</p>
One or a few make-up exams is a far cry from 81 make-up exams, which is what you suggested in a previous post. Please explain in detail how you would manage that. </p>
<p>My alma mater has a journalism school. There were no excuses for missing deadlines. None. Because when you go write for the NYTimes or the WSJ or the Chicago Tribune or whatever, you can’t just turn in your story when you feel like it, you can’t just run the paper with a big hole on the front page because you felt lazy that day.</p>
<p>You also haven’t explained how extending deadlines (in the absence of a legitimate emergency such as hospitalization) increases willingness to learn. </p>
<p>As someone who has taught at both a selective and a less selective school, I find the above statement by collegehelp somewhat offensive and of no truth whatsoever.</p>
<p>It also has nothing to do with the selectivity of a given school. </p>
<p>My public magnet was highly selective considering less than 5% of applicants taking the exam were admitted and yet, all the teachers/admins I dealt with there were extremely anal about deadlines. Knew some HS classmates whose A papers became Ds because they were turned in 2 days late. </p>
<p>In contrast, my respectable, but much less selective LAC by percentage had Profs who were IMO…exceedingly generous about granting extensions for the most flimsy of excuses. Some college classmates owed their graduations/passing of courses to such generous policies only to find out the professional/grad school world didn’t work that way to their detriment. </p>
<p>I’ve also recently heard from a younger friend attending a much less selective private NYC area college that his college granted him leave of absence without his even asking after they noticed his tanking grades and assumed he needed a break without doing any checking to see whether he was suffering a medical condition/death in the family/other serious emergency situation. Shocked was my reaction considering how it was granted without any solicitation on the student’s part…and hearing it’s common practice from other friends attending the same institution. </p>
<p>It also varied greatly by Profs/departments as shown by friends’ experiences at various institutions ranging from near-open admission institutions to elite/Ivy colleges…including HYPSMCC. </p>
<p>I honestly never knew you could ask for an extension or to take a make up exam until I got to law school and saw students asking for them for all kinds of things like they needed to go to a child’s school event or on a trip. Even the professors cancelled class for what I considered stupid and unfair reasons. One guy cancelled class 3 times on Fridays (at 10 am) for funerals. How many people does he know who die in one semester? </p>
<p>But learning to be on time, or early, is a good thing. Once I was sent running to the court to file trial points ordered by the judge on July 2, right before the holiday. I ran across town, yes RAN, and arrived huffing and puffing. I had to file one copy with the judge and one with the clerk. I went to the Judge first, had to be buzzed in, clear security, etc.,time was ticking, and I was running out of time. Then I ran down to the clerk’s desk and the big roller thing was down; it was closed. I stood there in shock, not knowing what to do when the judge’s clerk walked out, saw my panic, and took it back into the office and stamped it as received. I was still standing there trying to recover when the low level associate from the other side came running up. The clerk reappeared and saw him and said “Too late, we’re closed” and she walked away.</p>
<p>Two lessons: 1) be on time; 2) be nice to the clerks (she liked me, she didn’t like the other side)</p>
<p>@twoinanddone You wrote, “Even the professors cancelled class for what I considered stupid and unfair reasons. One guy cancelled class 3 times on Fridays (at 10 am) for funerals. How many people does he know who die in one semester?” I dunno about 3 funerals in one semester, but if one has to catch a plane meeting a 10 AM class could be a problem. I’m sure I’m not the only one, but two years ago I had to cancel lectures twice in one month to attend funerals on the West Coast and the East Coast for my father and my mother-in-law. The students understood, the TA’s filled in a bit.</p>
<p>I have the impression that my fellow profs are a very responsible group. Their lectures might not always be sparking, but they keep to schedules because they may have anywhere from 30 to 300 students who have made room in their own schedules to attend class, complete lab work and other assignments, and take exams. We are not fond of students turning in assignments late or asking for extensions. But it happens, usually for reasons that are legit.</p>
<p>I recommend The PhD Movie (based on the online comic by Jorge Cham). It is set at pseudo-Caltech. In the first film, a student comes up to ask a TA for an extension on the due date of a problem set–and the problem set hasn’t been assigned yet. </p>
<p>@QuantMech Caltech students have long had a certain reputation for commitment, and really snaking it (their term for studying hard, at least it used to be). That pseudo-Caltech is a nice send-up. I think the grad students were of that type, too. My brother was a TA for Richard Feynman, so not only did he have to know the Feynman Lectures inside and out but he realized that some of the students for whom he was a TA were smarter than he was. That kept him on his toes. No slacking.</p>
<p>@twoinanddone wrote: “Even the professors cancelled class for what I considered stupid and unfair reasons. One guy cancelled class 3 times on Fridays (at 10 am) for funerals. How many people does he know who die in one semester?”</p>
<p>Well, had my summer from a few years ago been during the academic year, I’d’ve had three funerals of reasonably close family members to (probably cancel classes to catch my plane and) go to. As one gets older, and particularly if one has a large family, these sorts of things do seem to occur more and more often.</p>
<p>“Even the professors cancelled class for what I considered stupid and unfair reasons.”</p>
<p>I can’t imagine if a prof had cancelled classes, I would have thought anything other than “whew, now another hour free.” It wouldn’t have occurred to me to really care about the reason why or make a note of it. </p>
<p>I"m a college administrator and you guys think that late work is okay truly have no idea what you are talking about. We have deadlines because there are financial aid procedures that have deadlines and if we don’t know if you’re going to pass your classes and come back next semester we can’t carry out the necessary actions to make sure you get your loans and grants. I have to staff the classes in our department and I need to know how people are doing mid-semester in order to figure out how many people will be in our classes next semester and how many adjuncts I need to recruit and hire for the Spring, or whether or not to fill out the paperwork to request a new hire for next year. The people at the bookstore need to know how many people are likely to come back so that they can put in their book orders in October for the semester starting in January. </p>
<p>The grading procedures are not actually a private deal between you and your faculty member because all of these statistics – number of people having to repeat a course; number of people going on academic probation; number of people returning or not returning – have ramifications all over the university. They affect how many student workers we need at the writing center, what our admissions acceptance rates need to be for next year, what that means for recruitment travel costs for admissions, etc. Your professors are aware of these deadlines and this is why they are not just ‘being a jerk’ in refusing to accept your late work. If they do, it will affect their abilities to say who is going to graduate in the spring vs the fall, etc. Students don’t see the big picture and that’s fine, but don’t assume that everyone who is letting you get your way is malicious.</p>
<p>No one here thinks turning in late work is OK (barring a legitimate excused reason such as being in the hospital, in which case presumably a dean of students would be involved from the get-go to “certify” the legitimacy). </p>
<p>Collegehelp is the only one who thinks so. There’s no “you guys” on this :-)</p>
I would never go to such lengths to “certify” someone’s excuses. While I often take late work, the consequences for the student of regularly turning things in late are generally seen in their poor grade results. If you are not keeping up, then you are not keeping up, as it were.</p>
<p>I wasn’t suggesting the onus was on the professor to “certify” the excuses. I was merely giving an example from when one of my kids was hospitalized earlier this year - my kid contacted the professors immediately, but also contacted the dean of students, and the dean of students reached out to the professors as well to indicate they knew the student was hospitalized and could the professor please excuse the absence / extend due dates accordingly. That’s all. </p>
<p>These funerals were all on Friday mornings because members of his church had died and I guess that’s when they did the funerals.We were all joking about it - how could one person know so many people who died and planned the funeral for 10 on Friday, and then someone explained they were church members. If you want to attend church functions on Friday mornings, don’t schedule to teach a class then. This was law school and there are no TAs. Missing that many sessions of a required class (required for students) who pay for it is unfair to the students. He then either rushed through the rules of evidence, combining two classes into one, or just told us to study the missed work on our own. Gee, if I wanted to learn on my own I could have done the Abe Lincoln thing and skipped law school and saved the tuition money. One miss? Sure, everyone has an emergency occasionally but not 3 Fridays out of 10 or 12. I really don’t think these were close family members because it was always just a “can’t be here Friday so class is cancelled” told to us on Wednesday. At least we did get advanced notice.</p>
<p>I liked getting a ‘snow day’ off for a class when I was an undergrad (especially if it was beautiful and not snowing) but when I was paying for 30 classes, I expected 30 classes. I also remember this prof giving a Monday lecture when there were a lot of people missing because it was opening day of baseball, so he gave the same lecture on Wed. Those of us there both days basically were penalized because we didn’t move forward. Just a lot of wasted time in his class. Wasted money too.</p>
<p>Regarding cutting class for opening day of baseball, I recall in June after his first year at UChicago I was driving my son home. He was relating stories to me about how he had tried to live IN Chicago and not just AT Chicago. He told me he’d gone to 5 or 6 baseball games, for example, and that would be in just the 2 months since the season started in early April. “Oh,” I said, “Did you ever cut class to attend a baseball game?” “Yes,” he said, “On opening day.” I asked, “Which opening day did you attend, Cubs or Sox?” “BOTH,” he said. He graduated “with honors” 3 years later.</p>
<p>I think this is where you go wrong. I’m a professor, and I don’t see it as more than an incidental part of my job to ‘instill a love of learning’ or give them a ‘lifetime curiosity’ about my discipline. These are not schoolchildren: they are adults who are paying to be there/</p>
<p>It’s no more my responsibility to instill a love of learning in the adults than it is a film academy’s job to instill a lifetime love of film in their adult students.</p>
<p>Frankly, if they don’t like it, they can get lost.</p>