But after designing an “extension without penalty” model for a large introductory biology course and analyzing student outcomes, Sarvary, a senior lecturer at Cornell University who directs its Investigative Biology Teaching Laboratories, is persuaded that such concerns can be resolved.
In a new paper published in Frontiers in Education, Sarvary and his education research postdoctoral associate, Joseph Ruesch, describe the results of the system, in which each assignment came with a preferred deadline and an extension deadline. Students were encouraged to complete their work by the first deadline but not penalized so long as they met the second.
Of the 347 enrolled students that semester, 41 percent used the extended deadline for one assignment, 37 percent used it more than once, and 22 percent did not use it. That shows that offering extensions doesn’t mean students will use them all.
Students indicated that the model lowered their stress, helped them handle illnesses and emergencies, and allowed them to do better in their other courses. There was no statistically significant difference in grades between the students who took one or more extensions and those who did not.
Among the downsides students identified was confusion about how the system worked. The paper is based on what happened the first semester the system was in place, in the fall of 2022, and the instructional team has improved its communication with students since then, Sarvary said.
Sarvary sees many advantages to this system. Because students can get an extension without asking, biases don’t dictate who receives one — and the instructor’s time is needed only in rare cases where the built-in extension doesn’t resolve the issue.
Another common approach for giving students extra time without adjudicating individual requests is letting students drop the assignment with the lowest score. In a course like intro biology, where students will be expected to be able to draw upon everything they’ve learned in the future, those models are less appealing, Sarvary says, because they give students less incentive to complete every assignment.
The extension-without-penalty model, then, is a way for professors whose courses depend on structure to build in flexibility. “The biggest takeaway,” Sarvary says, “is that instructors should not be scared of applying extensions.”
Flexibility plus structure
Coming up with a system for late work is one part of instructors’ efforts to strike a balance between structure and flexibility, as I wrote about in this story for The Chronicle’s 2023 Trends Report that leads off by describing a different project of Sarvary’s.
Revisiting this story — now over a year old — in light of Sarvary’s new paper, I wonder what, if anything, has changed. Are professors still adjusting to students’ heightened expectations of flexibility? Have those expectations shifted? Or do you think you’ve figured out a good approach for balancing structure and flexibility? Let me know at beckie.supiano@chronicle.com and your response may be featured in a future newsletter.
Student success
I read with interest a recent post in Paul Musgrave’s Systematic Hatreds newsletter, in which the associate professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst has been mulling over some of the key pressures higher ed is under.
In this one, Musgrave wrestles with the question of what outcome of a college education counts as a success. He describes a conversation he once had with a donor: “The generous friend said he wanted us to raise our students’ ambitions — to have them get involved. I mentioned that one of my recent graduates was planning to run for the state legislature. ‘No, no,’ he said. ‘Higher. They should think bigger. That’s too small.’”
Musgrave goes on to consider what sort of career is seen as a “good enough” outcome of college — and to what extent that career success is the right kind of outcome to focus on, anyhow.
For a while, I wrote about these questions a fair bit: I covered financial aid during the Obama years, when higher ed’s answer to every challenge seemed to be ROI: return on investment. It was interesting to read a professor’s perspective at this rather different moment.
I wonder what you think makes someone a college success story, and how you think about your own role in that project. Share your thoughts with me at beckie.supiano@chronicle.com and I may include them in a future issue of the newsletter.
Thanks for reading Teaching. If you have suggestions or ideas, please feel free to email us at beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com or beckie.supiano@chronicle.com.
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— Beckie
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