While some instructors have gone back to their pre-pandemic policies, most professors I interviewed said the pandemic had made them think more carefully about how to formulate late-work policies that are sustainable for them and equitable for their students.
Regan Gurung, who teaches psychology at Oregon State University, said he and many of his colleagues were “implicitly flexible” before the pandemic. While flexible policies may not have been specifically outlined in his syllabus, he usually gave students extensions when requested — and assumed that if students needed one, they’d ask for it. But that approach puts first-generation students and other students from marginalized groups, who are less likely to ask for accommodations, at a disadvantage: “Far too often, it’s been the student who is empowered or confident or socialized enough to know they can ask for an extension who gets it,” Gurung said.
That’s why Gurung, who is also associate vice provost and executive director of the university’s Center for Teaching and Learning, encourages faculty members to incorporate structure, including explicit policies on late work, into their courses: “Even though that seems to go in the face of providing flexibility, the data actually shows that structure is important for inclusive teaching.”
This term, he built a 24-hour buffer into all assignment deadlines in his own courses. And if students need extra time, they can fill out a Google form for a two-day extension.
I didn’t have room in the article to include one example of modified flexibility that I found particularly intriguing: Michael Ekstrand, an associate professor of computer science at Boise State University, gives students a certain number of late day passes that can be used for 24-hour extensions throughout the term. He also drops their assignment with the lowest score to offer some extra breathing room. Ekstrand said he’s tried a handful of approaches to late work throughout his eight years of teaching, but he always came back to this system. During the pandemic, he increased the allotment of late day passes from four to eight, but he didn’t have to change the structure. Now he’s dialed it in at six late passes.
He likes this system because it means he can keep his own deadlines, allowing him to grade in a predictable time frame and work through homework solutions with his class. It also sets a resource-based tone, not a punitive one. The goal, he said, is to accommodate a range of needs without requiring students to disclose more personal information than they want to share, or making him determine what is a valid excuse for an extension.
“Even when I did have a penalty system, I’d get requests for extensions without penalty, and I’d have to decide what’s worth an extension and what isn’t,” he said. “And making those kinds of decisions doesn’t feel pedagogically useful or necessary.”
My reporting suggests that there’s no one-size-fits-all solution to the deadline dilemma. I spoke with two professors who took a completely unstructured approach to deadline enforcement and reported great success. And two other professors said that instead of being lenient with late work, they restructured their courses to reward timeliness over perfection — either by breaking up larger projects into lower-stakes assignments, or by changing their point system for grading assignments.
Underlying the debate are considerations of class size and subject, as well as questions about how to formulate policies to meet course goals and accommodate student needs, which vary from institution to institution. What works for an English professor at a community college, for example, might not work for someone who teaches calculus to 400 students a semester. With so many professors reconsidering their approach to deadlines, there’s an increasingly diverse middle ground between full flexibility and the traditional hard-deadline model.
Flexibility vs. Structure
Pandemic teaching conditions have pushed many professors to offer students more flexibility than they had in the past: in their policies about deadlines, as Carolyn reported, and with attendance; the assignments they complete, and how they’re evaluated.
But flexibility lives in tension with students’ competing need for structure. That need may be heightened for students who are neurodivergent or the first in their families to attend college, among other groups.
So, how can professors strike a good balance between flexibility and structure? I’m doing some more reporting on this theme, and would love to hear examples of how you set your course at the right level of flexibility — especially if your thinking has changed over time. Tell me how you think this out, and what actions you’ve taken, at beckie.supiano@chronicle.com, and I may include your example in a future story.
Rethinking Finals
When classes shifted to emergency remote instruction in the spring of 2020, many professors changed their approach to final exams. Those changes had a variety of goals: reducing stress, making it harder to cheat, and simply dealing with what’s possible in an online test, among others.
I’ve wondered whether professors who altered their exams have kept those changes in place, moved back to their old systems, or done something else entirely. If your responses to my questions are any indication, it’s been a mixed bag. A few examples:
- Chris Seitz has made a series of changes in the exams in his undergraduate public-health courses at Appalachian State University, where he is an assistant professor. “During Covid, I put all of my exams online,” he wrote. “Knowing that cheating could be an issue, I made my exams open book and open note. I figured that if the exams were open book and open note, there’d be no need to work with others and cheat. Even so, I learned last semester that students shared all of my exam questions and answers on various internet sites. That really irritated me, so this semester, I rewrote all my exam questions and went ‘old school’ with paper-and-pencil exams. It was a lot of work to rewrite everything, and it’s more work to grade paper-and-pencil exams, but it’s all worth it just to know that my materials are not floating around the internet.”
- Shivaji Sengupta pushed the exam for an American-literature course taken mainly by seniors in a metacognitive direction. Sengupta, who recently retired as a professor of English and vice president for academic affairs at Boricua College, in New York City, had students “set a five-question exam for this course, and then write a 500-word essay explaining their rationale for setting it,” he wrote. “As help, I suggested they could ask questions on the characters’ character(s), or on some of the conflicts within them that they had read in the course. In the essay explaining why, I suggested they ask themselves what were the most important things they learned from the course, and what sort of questions they could ask that would address those things. I also suggested that they do NOT limit any of the questions to a single poem or story, but give the ‘students’ the freedom to choose which works or characters they wished to discuss. Out of the 16 students who took the exam, 11 responded with involvement and enthusiasm. Another three did not finish. Two abdicated entirely, saying they were not prepared for such an exam. What I found most absorbing was the empathy they showed for their students, often suggesting the ways they might consider while ‘answering’ the questions — not unlike the ways I had suggested them in my questions to them.”
- Theresa Marchant-Shapiro, a professor of political science at Southern Connecticut State University, made a significant change after the pandemic pushed her to carefully examine her learning objectives, she wrote. “For my undergraduate research-methods course, I came to the conclusion that the final exam was assessing the same things as the research project I had students conduct,” she wrote. “But the exam did a much worse job of measuring what students had learned, so I dropped it in Spring 2020, and haven’t added it back in. My university requires that we meet during the designated time for final exam, so we meet and have a party.”
Thanks for reading Teaching. If you have suggestions or ideas, please feel free to email us, at beckie.supiano@chronicle.com or beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com.
— Beckie
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