2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Background
Civil engineering assignments often have rigid deadlines that emphasize time management and prepare civil engineering students for meeting deadlines in their professional careers. However, early career professionals will typically be assigned tasks that are not as time critical with more flexible internal deadlines. For these assignments, it is important for early career professionals to communicate to their supervisors in advance when they need additional time and understand the consequences and impact on others when internal deadlines are not met.
Purpose
This study implemented two distinct late policies across multiple civil engineering courses and documented the extent to which students utilize them. Syllabus statements and rubrics are provided for those wishing to implement similar policies.
Methods
The first late policy requires students to email their professor in advance of an assignment due date to request an extension and propose a reasonable new deadline. This would be the common expectation for an early career professional that needs more time on an assignment. This policy could be difficult to manage in larger class sizes or when solutions need to be provided for the rest of the class in a timely manner. An alternative policy was also implemented where each assignment has an initial deadline and final deadline one class period later. There was no immediate penalty for submitting at the final deadline, but these submissions were graded with a rubric that provided less partial credit. The goal of this second policy was to incentivize students to meet the initial deadline, illustrate that missed deadlines have consequences, enable timely release of solutions, and simplify submission tracking in larger classes.
Results
Initially, we anticipated students would overuse extensions and consistently submit at the final deadline. In reality, extension requests were made less than 2% of the time over the past five semesters (49 extension requests across 3066 assignments). For the initial and final deadline policy, less than 12% of submissions were at the final deadline over the past four semesters (126 final deadline submissions across 1058 assignments).
Conclusion
We were pleasantly surprised by how infrequently students utilized these late policies. Students also appreciated the flexibility these policies afforded them for when life gets busy or unpredictable. Ultimately, these policies promote proactive communication and timely submissions which are professional skillsets that are essential for students to value when beginning their civil engineering careers.