2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Educators seeking academic rigor often point to the necessity of strict deadlines for student work to prepare students for the reality of life after college. However, during the pandemic, there were calls to relax deadlines to alleviate stress for the sake of the students’ mental health. Flexible deadlines can also benefit neurodiverse students and non-traditional or marginalized students. One argument against relaxed deadlines is the risk of students who turn assignments in late having an unfair advantage due to having more time to work or having access to solutions or classmates’ assignments. Accordingly, homework grades were examined for three past terms of a course at Unknown University with liberal late policies. The goal was to determine if there were any statistical differences between grades for students who turned homework in on time versus those whose work was turned in late. Additionally, the data was examined for correlations between late homework and the grades on related lab experiments. For every homework examined in three terms, the average homework score for the on-time homework was higher than the late homework score. This was true even if grades of zero were excluded from the sample. For nine of the assignments, the difference between on-time and late grades was statistically significant, further underlining that extra time did not provide any advantage, either in terms of being able to cheat off other students or spending additional time on the problems. Grades on the more difficult lab experiments were positively correlated with grades on certain homework assignments, but these benefits diminished the later the homework was turned in. Results indicate that while relaxed deadlines may provide mental health benefits for the students, the learning value of the homework assignments decreases the later they are turned in. Based on this data, a combination of liberal deadlines and directly reaching out to students whose work is more than three days late may maintain the mental health benefits while preserving the learning benefits.