Clearly, some of the desirable features identified above can be achieved by having many deadlines throughout the year. This helps in spreading the load of assessment and encouraging the students to work evenly. It also provides the data for regular and timely feedback to the students. One of the traditional arguments against having many deadlines is the huge cost of their administration, and this is often used as the excuse for not having them. The development of ARCADE held the automation of deadline management as the highest priority.
Another argument often used against having many deadlines is that the students are adults and should be allowed to pace their own work. The author believes that when this isn't a disguise for the reason quoted above, it is a genuine view held from a rather naive and idealistic perspective. It is true that some students can be successfully treated in this way, but the author's experience is that the vast majority simply cannot. If, for example, one has a 10 week period with a deadline at the end and no other monitoring of progress, then the mode pattern of work will be to start in earnest in about the 7th week, and fail to complete the work. An alternative to many deadlines would be to introduce a regular monitoring of progress by a person that the student respects (e.g. his or her tutor). However, whilst this would be certainly less patronizing, it is simply unaffordable in most universities for first and second year coursework, whereas deadlines are relatively cheap.
Another argument against regular deadlines is that they are incompatible with the students undertaking a single large exercise or project. However, experience from Manchester suggests that even in this scenario, deadlines which are just ticks and are of the type to `convince a demonstrator that you are N% through the effort', still work well to help ensure the students have a consistent pace (but of course, they do not spread the assessment load).
More evidence that students mostly work to deadlines is obtained from observing a typical laboratory session and deadline structure, of the kind previously used at Manchester for many years. In this we have a list of sessions with associated exercises which the students should in principle do at those times. However, each of these exercises has a deadline perhaps two weeks later. So, in effect, we give the students the same list of work twice, but with a two week difference in the dates. The author's experience observed over several years is that after a very short while the students simply ignore the first list and work to the second! This begs the question: why have two such lists? One answer is that it is just the obvious thing to do. Perhaps a more useful reason is that it can allow a single deadline to be set for each exercise, regardless of which laboratory group the student is in. This only works fairly if the distance from the last scehduled session to the deadline is at least a week, say, more than the spread of time over which the different groups have their scheduled session. Having a single deadline per exercise is a great saving of head-scratching in situations when there are many groups, but only in the absence of a machine managing the deadlines for us.