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Avoiding demoralization due to lateness

When a student gets a late flag because they are having general difficulties and finding the work hard, they may ask you for more time. We are not here talking about someone who has had special circumstances, such as an illness. You must be careful to treat all students equally, so if you are going to give more time to one person then you should be prepared to do so for all students in the same situation. If you do this too easily, you will undermine the deadlines. (If you really do feel the need to alter the deadlines for everyone, it is much cleaner to arrange it globally with the appropriate Laboratory Manager, than to dish out excuses to each student).

Another point to remember is that a student who is struggling really needs to work harder, but giving them more time would enable them to work at the same pace as they are doing, and so they will ultimately miss the last exercises completely.

On the other hand, when you refuse to give them more time, they will likely become demoralized. So a good approach is as follows. Explain that they can't have more time, but that they need to solve their difficulties and this will mean working harder and getting the right help from wherever they can (without cheating of course!). Discuss with them how they might go about resolving their problems. Then offer this deal: if they meet a future unextended deadline, you will forgive this late flag at that time. This does not happen automatically in ARCADE (yet?) so the student will need to remind you of the deal at the time they manage it. In the authors' experience this works rather well at remotivating the students and getting them to work harder. Even if they don't actually manage to clear this late flag under such a deal, they certainly manage to meet most future extended deadlines.

If and when the student does meet such an unextended deadline in the future, and reminds you of your deal, then on the sheet for which they had the late flag, you can add the excuse ``E met unextended deadline in later exercise'' to column 4 (met extended deadline). Note, in the unlikely event that the work you are now excusing was completed after its excuse expiry date, that excuse will need to be made non-expiring - a simple email to the appropriate laboratory manager will suffice for this.


next up previous contents
Next: The marking session Up: Laboratories and ARCADE: Instructions Previous: Erroneous late flag   Contents
John Latham 2008-10-30