Comment by knzhou | Hacker News Reader

Comment by knzhou | Hacker News Reader

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> For example, my assignments are now largely due at midnight, at a very particular second: submit a nanosecond late at your own penalty.

From the instructor's point of view, there's no winning here -- there will always be a cutoff, and any position of it will lead to complaints. Even for an informal system, there's always a last person allowed in, and hence a cutoff.

If you have a good reason for an extension, you can still get it. But there's no reason anybody needs, specifically, the extra second after a formal deadline. If the deadline were moved to a second after midnight, you would try to submit two seconds after midnight and complain, and so on. (I mean, why do you think deadlines are at midnight in the first place? Because in-person collection would stop working at 5 PM, leading to complaints, so deadlines were extended to midnight to let people work at night.)

This is pointless slippage, and the resolution from the student side is so easy. Just pretend every deadline is 5 minutes earlier than it actually is, and you'll never have problems.

I've been an instructor for CS courses before so I know what you mean. I never made deadlines anything but absolutely final, which is appropriately not unlike a lot of other things in life --- from what I've heard from others, any leniency just tends to cause more whining. Someone who waits until the last second to do something is not going to do any better if given a tiny bit more time (nevermind the question of how much more?), and in any case procrastination is not a habit we want to encourage.

How about having the student’s score decay as some function of how late they turn it in? If they turn it in before the deadline, they get 100% of their marked grade, if it’s an hour late 90%, a day late 50%, etc (use whatever function you want)

Usually, delays lead to logistical difficulties. Until every copy of an assignment is submitted, you can't release solutions, assign grades, talk about the problems in lectures or recitations, or really give any feedback whatsoever. I've had excellent courses that ran on your system, but in those cases they had it completely standardized from year to year, and even automated grading systems.

If you're just trying to solve the bad feelings caused by a really hard deadline, you could do something as simple as "due at midnight, 80% credit from midnight to 6am". Then everyone's still done by class.

This issue only comes up if you have a low caliber class where homework is nontrivial part of the grade.

My graduate classes were 100% homework-based almost without exception. When you're doing hard enough physics, it doesn't make sense to demand people do anything nontrivial in an hour, like in a typical exam. Real problems take at least whole days of thought.

My professor for Assembly did exactly that and it felt very fair. However, I think that was only possible because every assignment used an automated grading program, so we could weigh the risk vs reward when deciding if we should spend another day optimizing the code. If an actual person was burdened with grading each assignment, it makes sense to have a harder cutoff that ensures it's possible to grade in a batch for efficiency.

One of my professors at UCLA has a very lenient policy - you lose 2^(n-1) points, where n is the number of days after the deadline you've submitted. This meant that turning in your assignment one or two days late was no big deal, but turning it in four or five days late would be pretty bad.

At my u iversity your grade would decay by 5% a day, if I recall correctly.

My university cs department (most of them, anyway) used a system I liked very much:

- Due dates are hard (usually midnight)

- Everyone gets 3 "emergency tokens", which give you a 24 hour extension on the assignment, no questions asked. Max 2 per assignment.

- On occasion, you could get an extension without using a token by speaking to the professor in advance, if you had extenuating circumstances.

It was a good compromise between meaningful deadlines and humanity. One particular advantage is that, if you missed the midnight deadline, you knew you were using a town anyway, so there was no pressure to sacrifice sleep to get the assignment in "on time".

Most people I knew were happy with it.

Emergency tokens were a lifesaver for many of my college classes.

They gave me the freedom I needed to make micro-adjustments to my college/life balance and greatly lowered stress.

In undergrad most of my profs followed an even simpler system: if you get locked out just email the paper when you can with an explanation. Most professors are pretty accommodating, as sometimes your dog really does eat your homework.

I had one professor in college who went hard in the other direction—she told the class "I don't care if you turn in assignments late", and gave no limit on how late you could be.

As a student, it was, well, nice. It was true that it was a bit harder to be motivated to finish a paper right away, but it also made the process far less stressful. When I turned in papers I thought they were the best they could be.

Of course, I'm sure there were at least some students in her classes who ignored everything until the end of the term or something, and were quite stressed out at the end...

> I had one professor in college who went hard in the other direction—she told the class "I don't care if you turn in assignments late", and gave no limit on how late you could be.

This doesn't work if your class builds on earlier material (most STEM classes). As the professor, I need some feedback as to how well the class understands what I just taught.

It's possible but not in large lecture courses. I took a class with <15 people and our prof was so kind as to essentially let us get in our proofs whenever (which was an absolute lifesaver). But at that scale you of course can tell whether or not people are understanding without the assignments (since everyone is proving things together in class!)

Depends on the stem classes. Most of mine charged ahead with the new material even if the last exam average was 52%, in fact that might be considered a very good exam average.

Students are going to complain regardless. I had soft deadlines when I graded. Assignments were due at midnight but I told them as long as it was in by the time I pulled their repos (I'd do it first thing in the morning) I wouldn't dock them. A few times I had students complain. I clearly told them that I was already giving them leniency and if they want to attempt to take advantage of my niceness that I'd remove it for everyone. Those students only tried once and it didn't happen often. Students need to learn personal responsibility or they won't have them by the time they enter the work place or grad school. Also if you don't show them humanity then they won't learn this and we slowly lose it in our society.

Though I ended up with weird reviews. I got just as many students saying I was their best teacher as those saying worst teacher. I also had a surprising number of students try to turn into me the skeleton code I provided them claiming they did the assignment (they'd add like a line or two). Also had students say I was unavailable even though I lived in my office with my door open (students frequently came by outside office hours) and replied to emails between 9am and 1am. Learned that the complaints don't always match what you're doing and are hard to interpret.

Tldr: students will complain no matter what. Just be human. It's easier and less stressful for everyone involved.

> I've been an instructor for CS courses before so I know what you mean. I never made deadlines anything but absolutely final

As a CS professor, the one thing I could do that flipped things on their head was running an automatic submission and testing system for any assignment.

You're getting 0% or 100%, but you know at all times over roughly 2 weeks exactly what score you are getting. You can resubmit over and over. Yes, I'm going to run extra tests once the deadline passes to make sure no one is punking me, but it's rare that someone who gets 100% on the initial tests doesn't get 100% on the later tests.

And, for those of you who think that 0%/100% is a poor programming assignment scoring system--I'll ask you the same question I ask my students: "0%/100% is bad? So which of you are cool with partial credit when I miscalculate your grades?"

I don't think you appreciate the basic point that many people do not wish to live in such a mechanistic and rigid society to begin with.

Rules aren't made to make people miserable, they're made to keep things running for everybody involved.

Yes, that's the point. The reason that assignments are due on a certain day each week is that you've blocked out a certain afternoon of the week to go over the blasted things. If people routinely handed stuff in late then stuff would pile up, especially near the end of the semester, and the backup would interfere with the rest of your duties.

>Even for an informal system, there's always a last person allowed in, and hence a cutoff.

Is there really? In my faculty, doors were kept open. I entered lectures at 20% of time left and nobody would bat an eyelid.

They meant for turning in assignments.

Oh.

Hard deadline system with some conveniences.

It was possible to upload the work multiple times, and for an hour or so after deathline, to select which of the uploaded copies would be the hand over.

This allowed for e.g. uploading some code that works, and later progressively optimized/improved versions, without fear of uploading something partially broken by the end.

Slippage is never pointless but rather an important aspect for any efficient system. If you are setting the deadline at midnight instead of 4pm then you are making most of the students work longer on the assignment. Set the hard deadline to 4pm and then allow a few students to submit late. That ends up being less of a burden on students and society.

That’s not any different. Now how late are you allowed to submit? 5 PM? Sometime at night? Midnight? How many people are allowed to submit late? What if word gets out that everybody is allowed to? You get the exact same problem, except that more of the professor and TA’s time is wasted, and the whole process now has favoritism baked in.

I have seen deadlines wrap all the way around a 24 hour cycle in this way. 5 PM is bad because people want to work at night, so delay to midnight. Well, people aren’t finishing, so delay to 5 AM, since everybody would be asleep then. Well now people are blaming you for “forcing” them to do all nighters, so delay to 9 AM. Now people say that’s unreasonable, because submitting later in the workday wouldn’t hurt anyone. So delay to 5 PM.

The only rebuttal to this that has been effective to a class is: if you see it at the day you ignore the time expecting it to be at 11:59PM. If I put it at 7 AM (to give you the whole night) the next day then you think it will be due at the end of the day so it is staying at 11:59PM.

It is different. By setting a deadline at midnight, you’re setting a tone that work is expected to happen then.

In my undergraduate education, toxic behavior like this was common. One professor who was a particular asshole deliberately assigned onerous assignments to coincide with an assignment for another critical, difficult class that 75% of the students were taking. Academic hazing was pretty common in CS.

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