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• tranngan889 - 22:16:24 11/09/2020

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10 Useful Tips for Students to Submit Assignments on Time

Team Desklib

Published: 2023-02-07

We all have been on the receiving side of the terror that comes with running late to turn in your assignment. As a student, one of the most critical skills you can develop is submitting your assignments on time. Late submissions can result in lost grades, missed opportunities, and added stress, making it essential for students to understand the importance of timely submissions.

In this comprehensive guide, we’ll share a wealth of tips and strategies that can help you ensure timely submissions and help you stay on top of your coursework - 

1. Create a schedule

The first step in submitting assignments on time is to create a schedule. This can prove to be a useful step in the entire process. A schedule will help you keep track of your deadlines and plan your time accordingly. You can use a physical planner or a digital calendar, whichever works best for you. Make sure to include all of your assignments, exams, and other commitments in your schedule so that you have a clear understanding of how much time you have available.

2. Start timely

It is essential to start working on your assignments as early as possible. Waiting until the last minute to start your assignment can result in stress and decreased quality of work. By starting early, you’ll have enough time to review and refine your work, ensuring that you submit a high-quality assignment. Having said that, we understand and aren't too optimistic that balancing school life and homework can be a task. In that case, you can always start with the easy part so that it can create a sense of winning, which will eventually lead you to complete the entire assignment.

3. Break down tasks

Breaking down a large assignment into smaller tasks can make it seem more manageable and help you avoid procrastination. By setting deadlines for each of these tasks, you can keep yourself accountable and ensure that you’re making progress toward your end goal. Another way to go about it is to prioritize tasks based on their importance and urgency, making sure to complete the most critical tasks first.

One of the key benefits of breaking down tasks is increased productivity. When students are faced with a large and complex assignment, it can be easy to become overwhelmed and demotivated. However, by breaking the assignment down into smaller tasks, students can focus on one component at a time, making it easier to make progress and complete the assignment in a timely manner. This can help students to avoid procrastination and ensure that they are making progress toward their goals.

4. Use tools and resources

There are many tools and resources available to help students stay organized and on track. For example, you can use online citation generators to help you format your bibliography correctly or use productivity apps to stay focused and avoid distractions. Utilizing these tools and resources can save you time and help you submit your assignments on time. One such assignment help website is Desklib; here you can find study material and documents in abundance where as a student you can have access to help conveniently. 

5. Ask for help

Don’t hesitate to reach out to your teachers, tutors, or classmates if you need help. They can provide you with valuable feedback and insights that can improve your work and ensure that you’re on the right track. Furthermore, if you’re struggling with a particular aspect of an assignment, seeking help can save you time and prevent you from making costly mistakes.

Asking for help is a critical aspect of student success, especially when it comes to completing class assignments. Whether students are struggling to understand a complex concept or need assistance with a specific task, seeking help can provide them with the support they need to succeed. 

6. Manage your time effectively

Effective time management is necessary in order to turn in an assignment timely. When writing an assignment, make sure to allocate your time wisely and prioritize tasks based on their importance and urgency. This step can also help improve the quality of the final product. It is important to take regular breaks, review the work completed so far, and make any necessary revisions. By managing time effectively, it is possible to allocate sufficient time for these activities, ensuring that the final product is of the best possible quality.

7. Stay organized

Staying organized can also help to prioritize tasks and deadlines. When working on an assignment, it can be easy to feel overwhelmed by the many tasks and deadlines involved. However, by staying organized, it is possible to see the big picture and prioritize tasks in a way that ensures that everything is completed on time and to a high standard.

Make sure to keep all of your notes, materials, and other resources in one place so that you can easily access them when you need them. You can also use a filing system or an online storage solution to help you stay organized. 

8. Set realistic goals

It’s important to set realistic goals for yourself when submitting assignments. While it’s great to strive for excellence, setting unrealistic goals can result in added stress and decreased productivity. Make sure to set achievable goals and focus on making progress towards your goals rather than striving for perfection.

9. Eliminate distractions

Distractions can have a significant impact on your productivity and ability to complete a task at hand. While working, make sure to eliminate distractions by creating a conducive environment for studying like turning off your phone, or using a noise-canceling app. I know this might sound and feel a bit tough at first but trust me, it only gets better from hereon. This step will get the work done effectively and timely. 

10. Reward yourself 

In the end, do not forget to pat yourself on the back. After having completed the assignment, it is equally important to reward yourself for your hard work and achievements. 

Conclusion:

In conclusion, submitting your assignments on time is crucial for your academic success. We hope that we could help you a little by providing you with these tips. We hope that the above-given tips will help ensure that your work is completed to the best of your ability and submitted on time.

Remember, consistent effort and planning can go a long way in achieving your goals.

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Online Learning: How to Submit Assignments

Online learning for dummies.

Sign up for the Dummies Beta Program to try Dummies' newest way to learn.

Where did you store that file, attachments uploading papers and projects.

If there’s a secret to using this feature, it’s knowing how to upload and hitting the Submit button until you receive confirmation. In most systems, you look for a button labeled Add a File or Upload. This prompts you to browse your computer to find the file. (See why knowing where you stored it is important?) Usually, you click Open after you identify the file you want and then click Submit. The next screen you see should be a confirmation that the file has been uploaded. This figure shows what this looks like from the Student view in Canvas.

If your instructor doesn’t have this tool available, they may ask you to attach your work to an email. This process works the same as attaching photos to send to your dear cousin Ted. You find the Attachment icon (usually a paper clip), browse for the file, and upload. The uploading skill seems to be universal, whether you’re attaching a document to an email or a discussion board posting.

Some learning management systems connect to your Microsoft 365 or Google file structure, so you may be able to upload files from there.

Post, Emily! Submitting discussion posts

• Compose: Look for this button if you need to start a new discussion, one that isn’t attached to anyone else’s idea.
• Reply: Use this button when you want to respond to something another person wrote. Here’s a super tip: Copy and paste one or two lines from the original text (delete the rest) so that you can quote the first author and focus your comments.
• Post: After you have composed or replied, you must remember to hit Post or Submit. Otherwise, your great ideas don’t appear on the discussion board.

The Submit button on quizzes and tests

Tips for submitting any assignment

Whether you’re working with papers, projects, discussion posts, quizzes, or tests, consider the following general pointers: Submit early, have a backup plan, and keep a copy. Here’s why these are important:

• Submit early, when possible, in case of problems: What if you plan to submit your assignment at 11:56 p.m. on the night it’s due by midnight and the whole system crashes or your hard drive freezes? You don’t have a lot of time to remedy that situation. A safer bet is to submit your work during normal working hours, well before you need to. That way, if you encounter a problem, you’re more likely to contact a real-life tech support person who can assist you.
• Attach to email when technology fails: Still on the 11:56 p.m. track? When all else fails, send the same assignment as an attachment to an email to your instructor. Include a polite note explaining that the system wasn’t cooperating and that you wanted to be sure to get the assignment turned in, one way or another. This shows good problem-solving skills.
• Keep a copy: Always, always keep copies of your work for the term of the course. You never know when you might need them. It’s common for the system to freeze up when you’re trying to submit a great discussion post (always when you’ve written something worthy of a Pulitzer), so if you first compose in a word processor and then copy and paste to the discussion area, you’re safe in knowing that you have the original text. Should there be any question, you can find the file and resubmit it.

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The 5 Best Homework Help Websites (Free and Paid!)

Other High School , General Education

Listen: we know homework isn’t fun, but it is a good way to reinforce the ideas and concepts you’ve learned in class. But what if you’re really struggling with your homework assignments?

If you’ve looked online for a little extra help with your take-home assignments, you’ve probably stumbled across websites claiming to provide the homework help and answers students need to succeed . But can homework help sites really make a difference? And if so, which are the best homework help websites you can use? 

Below, we answer these questions and more about homework help websites–free and paid. We’ll go over: 

• The basics of homework help websites
• The cost of homework help websites 
• The five best homework websites out there 
• The pros and cons of using these websites for homework help 
• The line between “learning” and “cheating” when using online homework help 
• Tips for getting the most out of a homework help website

So let’s get started! 

The Basics About Homework Help Websites–Free and Paid

Homework help websites are designed to help you complete your homework assignments, plain and simple. 

What Makes a Homework Help Site Worth Using

Most of the best sites allow users to ask questions and then provide an answer (or multiple possible answers) and explanation in seconds. In some instances, you can even send a photo of a particular assignment or problem instead of typing the whole thing out! 

Homework help sites also offer more than just help answering homework questions. Common services provided are Q&A with experts, educational videos, lectures, practice tests and quizzes, learning modules, math solving tools, and proofreading help. Homework help sites can also provide textbook solutions (i.e. answers to problems in tons of different textbooks your school might be using), one-on-one tutoring, and peer-to-peer platforms that allow you to discuss subjects you’re learning about with your fellow students. 

And best of all, nearly all of them offer their services 24/7, including tutoring! 

What You Should Should Look Out For

When it comes to homework help, there are lots–and we mean lots –of scam sites out there willing to prey on desperate students. Before you sign up for any service, make sure you read reviews to ensure you’re working with a legitimate company. 

A word to the wise: the more a company advertises help that veers into the territory of cheating, the more likely it is to be a scam. The best homework help websites are going to help you learn the concepts you’ll need to successfully complete your homework on your own. (We’ll go over the difference between “homework help” and “cheating” a little later!) 

You don't need a golden piggy bank to use homework help websites. Some provide low or no cost help for students like you!

How Expensive Are the Best Homework Help Websites?

First of all, just because a homework help site costs money doesn’t mean it’s a good service. Likewise, just because a homework help website is free doesn’t mean the help isn’t high quality. To find the best websites, you have to take a close look at the quality and types of information they provide! 

When it comes to paid homework help services, the prices vary pretty widely depending on the amount of services you want to subscribe to. Subscriptions can cost anywhere from $2 to $150 dollars per month, with the most expensive services offering several hours of one-on-one tutoring with a subject expert per month.

The 5 Best Homework Help Websites 

So, what is the best homework help website you can use? The answer is that it depends on what you need help with. 

The best homework help websites are the ones that are reliable and help you learn the material. They don’t just provide answers to homework questions–they actually help you learn the material. 

That’s why we’ve broken down our favorite websites into categories based on who they’re best for . For instance, the best website for people struggling with math might not work for someone who needs a little extra help with science, and vice versa. 

Keep reading to find the best homework help website for you! 

Best Free Homework Help Site: Khan Academy

• Price: Free!
• Best for: Practicing tough material 

Not only is Khan Academy free, but it’s full of information and can be personalized to suit your needs. When you set up your account , you choose which courses you need to study, and Khan Academy sets up a personal dashboard of instructional videos, practice exercises, and quizzes –with both correct and incorrect answer explanations–so you can learn at your own pace. 

As an added bonus, it covers more course topics than many other homework help sites, including several AP classes.

Runner Up: Brainly.com offers a free service that allows you to type in questions and get answers and explanations from experts. The downside is that you’re limited to two answers per question and have to watch ads. 

Best Paid Homework Help Site: Chegg

• Price: $14.95 to $19.95 per month
• Best for: 24/7 homework assistance  

This service has three main parts . The first is Chegg Study, which includes textbook solutions, Q&A with subject experts, flashcards, video explanations, a math solver, and writing help. The resources are thorough, and reviewers state that Chegg answers homework questions quickly and accurately no matter when you submit them.  

Chegg also offers textbook rentals for students who need access to textbooks outside of their classroom. Finally, Chegg offers Internship and Career Advice for students who are preparing to graduate and may need a little extra help with the transition out of high school. 

Another great feature Chegg provides is a selection of free articles geared towards helping with general life skills, like coping with stress and saving money. Chegg’s learning modules are comprehensive, and they feature solutions to the problems in tons of different textbooks in a wide variety of subjects. 

Runner Up: Bartleby offers basically the same services as Chegg for $14.99 per month. The reason it didn’t rank as the best is based on customer reviews that say user questions aren’t answered quite as quickly on this site as on Chegg. Otherwise, this is also a solid choice!

Best Site for Math Homework Help: Photomath

• Price: Free (or $59.99 per year for premium services) 
• Best for: Explaining solutions to math problems

This site allows you to t ake a picture of a math problem, and instantly pulls up a step-by-step solution, as well as a detailed explanation of the concept. Photomath also includes animated videos that break down mathematical concepts to help you better understand and remember them. 

The basic service is free, but for an additional fee you can get extra study tools and learn additional strategies for solving common math problems.

Runner Up: KhanAcademy offers in-depth tutorials that cover complex math topics for free, but you won’t get the same tailored help (and answers!) that Photomath offers. 

Best Site for English Homework Help: Princeton Review Academic Tutoring

• Price: $40 to $153 per month, depending on how many hours of tutoring you want 
• Best for: Comprehensive and personalized reading and writing help 

While sites like Grammarly and Sparknotes help you by either proofreading what you write via an algorithm or providing book summaries, Princeton Review’s tutors provide in-depth help with vocabulary, literature, essay writing and development, proofreading, and reading comprehension. And unlike other services, you’ll have the chance to work with a real person to get help. 

The best part is that you can get on-demand English (and ESL) tutoring from experts 24/7. That means you can get help whenever you need it, even if you’re pulling an all-nighter! 

This is by far the most expensive homework site on this list, so you’ll need to really think about what you need out of a homework help website before you commit. One added benefit is that the subscription covers over 80 other subjects, including AP classes, which can make it a good value if you need lots of help!  

Best Site for STEM Homework Help: Studypool

• Best for: Science homework help
• Price: Varies; you’ll pay for each question you submit

When it comes to science homework help, there aren’t a ton of great resources out there. The best of the bunch is Studypool, and while it has great reviews, there are some downsides as well. 

Let’s start with the good stuff. Studypool offers an interesting twist on the homework help formula. After you create a free account, you can submit your homework help questions, and tutors will submit bids to answer your questions. You’ll be able to select the tutor–and price point–that works for you, then you’ll pay to have your homework question answered. You can also pay a small fee to access notes, lectures, and other documents that top tutors have uploaded. 

The downside to Studypool is that the pricing is not transparent . There’s no way to plan for how much your homework help will cost, especially if you have lots of questions! Additionally, it’s not clear how tutors are selected, so you’ll need to be cautious when you choose who you’d like to answer your homework questions.  

What Are the Pros and Cons of Using Homework Help Sites?

Homework help websites can be a great resource if you’re struggling in a subject, or even if you just want to make sure that you’re really learning and understanding topics and ideas that you’re interested in. But, there are some possible drawbacks if you don’t use these sites responsibly. 

We’ll go over the good–and the not-so-good–aspects of getting online homework help below. 

3 Pros of Using Homework Help Websites 

First, let’s take a look at the benefits. 

#1: Better Grades Beyond Homework

This is a big one! Getting outside help with your studies can improve your understanding of concepts that you’re learning, which translates into better grades when you take tests or write essays. 

Remember: homework is designed to help reinforce the concepts you learned in class. If you just get easy answers without learning the material behind the problems, you may not have the tools you need to be successful on your class exams…or even standardized tests you’ll need to take for college. 

#2: Convenience

One of the main reasons that online homework help is appealing is because it’s flexible and convenient. You don’t have to go to a specific tutoring center while they’re open or stay after school to speak with your teacher. Instead, you can access helpful resources wherever you can access the internet, whenever you need them.

This is especially true if you tend to study at off hours because of your extracurriculars, work schedule, or family obligations. Sites that offer 24/7 tutoring can give you the extra help you need if you can’t access the free resources that are available at your school. 

#3: Variety

Not everyone learns the same way. Maybe you’re more of a visual learner, but your teacher mostly does lectures. Or maybe you learn best by listening and taking notes, but you’re expected to learn something just from reading the textbook . 

One of the best things about online homework help is that it comes in a variety of forms. The best homework help sites offer resources for all types of learners, including videos, practice activities, and even one-on-one discussions with real-life experts. 

This variety can also be a good thing if you just don’t really resonate with the way a concept is being explained (looking at you, math textbooks!).

Not so fast. There are cons to homework help websites, too. Get to know them below!

3 Cons of Using Homework Help Websites 

Now, let’s take a look at the drawbacks of online homework help. 

#1: Unreliable Info

This can be a real problem. In addition to all the really good homework help sites, there are a whole lot of disreputable or unreliable sites out there. The fact of the matter is that some homework help sites don’t necessarily hire people who are experts in the subjects they’re talking about. In those cases, you may not be getting the accurate, up-to-date, and thorough information you need.

Additionally, even the great sites may not be able to answer all of your homework questions. This is especially true if the site uses an algorithm or chatbot to help students…or if you’re enrolled in an advanced or college-level course. In these cases, working with your teacher or school-provided tutors are probably your best option. 

#2: No Clarification

This depends on the service you use, of course. But the majority of them provide free or low-cost help through pre-recorded videos. Watching videos or reading info online can definitely help you with your homework… but you can’t ask questions or get immediate feedback if you need it .

#3: Potential For Scamming 

Like we mentioned earlier, there are a lot of homework help websites out there, and lots of them are scams. The review comments we read covered everything from outdated or wrong information, to misleading claims about the help provided, to not allowing people to cancel their service after signing up. 

No matter which site you choose to use, make sure you research and read reviews before you sign up–especially if it’s a paid service! 

When Does “Help” Become “Cheating”?

Admittedly, whether using homework help websites constitutes cheating is a bit of a grey area. For instance, is it “help” when a friend reads your essay for history class and corrects your grammar, or is it “cheating”? The truth is, not everyone agrees on when “help” crosses the line into “cheating .” When in doubt, it can be a good idea to check with your teacher to see what they think about a particular type of help you want to get. 

That said, a general rule of thumb to keep in mind is to make sure that the assignment you turn in for credit is authentically yours . It needs to demonstrate your own thoughts and your own current abilities. Remember: the point of every homework assignment is to 1) help you learn something, and 2) show what you’ve learned. 

So if a service answers questions or writes essays for you, there’s a good chance using it constitutes cheating. 

Here’s an example that might help clarify the difference for you. Brainstorming essay ideas with others or looking online for inspiration is “help” as long as you write the essay yourself. Having someone read it and give you feedback about what you need to change is also help, provided you’re the one that makes the changes later. 

But copying all or part of an essay you find online or having someone write (or rewrite) the whole thing for you would be “cheating.” The same is true for other subjects. Ultimately, if you’re not generating your own work or your own answers, it’s probably cheating.

5 Tips for Finding the Best Homework Help Websites for You

Now that you know some of our favorite homework help websites, free and paid, you can start doing some additional research on your own to decide which services might work best for you! Here are some top tips for choosing a homework help website. 

Tip 1: Decide How You Learn Best 

Before you decide which site or sites you’re going to use for homework help, y ou should figure out what kind of learning style works for you the most. Are you a visual learner? Then choose a site that uses lots of videos to help explain concepts. If you know you learn best by actually doing tasks, choose a site that provides lots of practice exercises.

Tip 2: Determine Which Subjects You Need Help With

Just because a homework help site is good overall doesn’t mean that it’s equally good for every subject. If you only need help in math, choose a site that specializes in that area. But if history is where you’re struggling, a site that specializes in math won’t be much help. So make sure to choose a site that you know provides high-quality help in the areas you need it most. 

Tip 3: Decide How Much One-On-One Help You Need 

This is really about cost-effectiveness. If you learn well on your own by reading and watching videos, a free site like Khan Academy is a good choice. But if you need actual tutoring, or to be able to ask questions and get personalized answers from experts, a paid site that provides that kind of service may be a better option.

Tip 4: Set a Budget

If you decide you want to go with a paid homework help website, set a budget first . The prices for sites vary wildly, and the cost to use them can add up quick. 

Tip 5: Read the Reviews

Finally, it’s always a good idea to read actual reviews written by the people using these homework sites. You’ll learn the good, the bad, and the ugly of what the users’ experiences have been. This is especially true if you intend to subscribe to a paid service. You’ll want to make sure that users think it’s worth the price overall!

What’s Next?

If you want to get good grades on your homework, it’s a good idea to learn how to tackle it strategically. Our expert tips will help you get the most out of each assignment…and boost your grades in the process.

Doing well on homework assignments is just one part of getting good grades. We’ll teach you everything you need to know about getting great grades in high school in this article.

Of course, test grades can make or break your GPA, too. Here are 17 expert tips that’ll help you get the most out of your study prep before you take an exam.

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Ashley Sufflé Robinson has a Ph.D. in 19th Century English Literature. As a content writer for PrepScholar, Ashley is passionate about giving college-bound students the in-depth information they need to get into the school of their dreams.

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What’s the Right Amount of Homework?

Decades of research show that homework has some benefits, especially for students in middle and high school—but there are risks to assigning too much.

Many teachers and parents believe that homework helps students build study skills and review concepts learned in class. Others see homework as disruptive and unnecessary, leading to burnout and turning kids off to school. Decades of research show that the issue is more nuanced and complex than most people think: Homework is beneficial, but only to a degree. Students in high school gain the most, while younger kids benefit much less.

The National PTA and the National Education Association support the “ 10-minute homework guideline ”—a nightly 10 minutes of homework per grade level. But many teachers and parents are quick to point out that what matters is the quality of the homework assigned and how well it meets students’ needs, not the amount of time spent on it.

The guideline doesn’t account for students who may need to spend more—or less—time on assignments. In class, teachers can make adjustments to support struggling students, but at home, an assignment that takes one student 30 minutes to complete may take another twice as much time—often for reasons beyond their control. And homework can widen the achievement gap, putting students from low-income households and students with learning disabilities at a disadvantage.

However, the 10-minute guideline is useful in setting a limit: When kids spend too much time on homework, there are real consequences to consider.

Small Benefits for Elementary Students

As young children begin school, the focus should be on cultivating a love of learning, and assigning too much homework can undermine that goal. And young students often don’t have the study skills to benefit fully from homework, so it may be a poor use of time (Cooper, 1989 ; Cooper et al., 2006 ; Marzano & Pickering, 2007 ). A more effective activity may be nightly reading, especially if parents are involved. The benefits of reading are clear: If students aren’t proficient readers by the end of third grade, they’re less likely to succeed academically and graduate from high school (Fiester, 2013 ).

For second-grade teacher Jacqueline Fiorentino, the minor benefits of homework did not outweigh the potential drawback of turning young children against school at an early age, so she experimented with dropping mandatory homework. “Something surprising happened: They started doing more work at home,” Fiorentino writes . “This inspiring group of 8-year-olds used their newfound free time to explore subjects and topics of interest to them.” She encouraged her students to read at home and offered optional homework to extend classroom lessons and help them review material.

Moderate Benefits for Middle School Students

As students mature and develop the study skills necessary to delve deeply into a topic—and to retain what they learn—they also benefit more from homework. Nightly assignments can help prepare them for scholarly work, and research shows that homework can have moderate benefits for middle school students (Cooper et al., 2006 ). Recent research also shows that online math homework, which can be designed to adapt to students’ levels of understanding, can significantly boost test scores (Roschelle et al., 2016 ).

There are risks to assigning too much, however: A 2015 study found that when middle school students were assigned more than 90 to 100 minutes of daily homework, their math and science test scores began to decline (Fernández-Alonso, Suárez-Álvarez, & Muñiz, 2015 ). Crossing that upper limit can drain student motivation and focus. The researchers recommend that “homework should present a certain level of challenge or difficulty, without being so challenging that it discourages effort.” Teachers should avoid low-effort, repetitive assignments, and assign homework “with the aim of instilling work habits and promoting autonomous, self-directed learning.”

In other words, it’s the quality of homework that matters, not the quantity. Brian Sztabnik, a veteran middle and high school English teacher, suggests that teachers take a step back and ask themselves these five questions :

• How long will it take to complete?
• Have all learners been considered?
• Will an assignment encourage future success?
• Will an assignment place material in a context the classroom cannot?
• Does an assignment offer support when a teacher is not there?

More Benefits for High School Students, but Risks as Well

By the time they reach high school, students should be well on their way to becoming independent learners, so homework does provide a boost to learning at this age, as long as it isn’t overwhelming (Cooper et al., 2006 ; Marzano & Pickering, 2007 ). When students spend too much time on homework—more than two hours each night—it takes up valuable time to rest and spend time with family and friends. A 2013 study found that high school students can experience serious mental and physical health problems, from higher stress levels to sleep deprivation, when assigned too much homework (Galloway, Conner, & Pope, 2013 ).

Homework in high school should always relate to the lesson and be doable without any assistance, and feedback should be clear and explicit.

Teachers should also keep in mind that not all students have equal opportunities to finish their homework at home, so incomplete homework may not be a true reflection of their learning—it may be more a result of issues they face outside of school. They may be hindered by issues such as lack of a quiet space at home, resources such as a computer or broadband connectivity, or parental support (OECD, 2014 ). In such cases, giving low homework scores may be unfair.

Since the quantities of time discussed here are totals, teachers in middle and high school should be aware of how much homework other teachers are assigning. It may seem reasonable to assign 30 minutes of daily homework, but across six subjects, that’s three hours—far above a reasonable amount even for a high school senior. Psychologist Maurice Elias sees this as a common mistake: Individual teachers create homework policies that in aggregate can overwhelm students. He suggests that teachers work together to develop a school-wide homework policy and make it a key topic of back-to-school night and the first parent-teacher conferences of the school year.

Parents Play a Key Role

Homework can be a powerful tool to help parents become more involved in their child’s learning (Walker et al., 2004 ). It can provide insights into a child’s strengths and interests, and can also encourage conversations about a child’s life at school. If a parent has positive attitudes toward homework, their children are more likely to share those same values, promoting academic success.

But it’s also possible for parents to be overbearing, putting too much emphasis on test scores or grades, which can be disruptive for children (Madjar, Shklar, & Moshe, 2015 ). Parents should avoid being overly intrusive or controlling—students report feeling less motivated to learn when they don’t have enough space and autonomy to do their homework (Orkin, May, & Wolf, 2017 ; Patall, Cooper, & Robinson, 2008 ; Silinskas & Kikas, 2017 ). So while homework can encourage parents to be more involved with their kids, it’s important to not make it a source of conflict.

Is homework a necessary evil?

After decades of debate, researchers are still sorting out the truth about homework’s pros and cons. One point they can agree on: Quality assignments matter.

By Kirsten Weir

March 2016, Vol 47, No. 3

Print version: page 36

• Schools and Classrooms

Homework battles have raged for decades. For as long as kids have been whining about doing their homework, parents and education reformers have complained that homework's benefits are dubious. Meanwhile many teachers argue that take-home lessons are key to helping students learn. Now, as schools are shifting to the new (and hotly debated) Common Core curriculum standards, educators, administrators and researchers are turning a fresh eye toward the question of homework's value.

But when it comes to deciphering the research literature on the subject, homework is anything but an open book.

The 10-minute rule

In many ways, homework seems like common sense. Spend more time practicing multiplication or studying Spanish vocabulary and you should get better at math or Spanish. But it may not be that simple.

Homework can indeed produce academic benefits, such as increased understanding and retention of the material, says Duke University social psychologist Harris Cooper, PhD, one of the nation's leading homework researchers. But not all students benefit. In a review of studies published from 1987 to 2003, Cooper and his colleagues found that homework was linked to better test scores in high school and, to a lesser degree, in middle school. Yet they found only faint evidence that homework provided academic benefit in elementary school ( Review of Educational Research , 2006).

Then again, test scores aren't everything. Homework proponents also cite the nonacademic advantages it might confer, such as the development of personal responsibility, good study habits and time-management skills. But as to hard evidence of those benefits, "the jury is still out," says Mollie Galloway, PhD, associate professor of educational leadership at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon. "I think there's a focus on assigning homework because [teachers] think it has these positive outcomes for study skills and habits. But we don't know for sure that's the case."

Even when homework is helpful, there can be too much of a good thing. "There is a limit to how much kids can benefit from home study," Cooper says. He agrees with an oft-cited rule of thumb that students should do no more than 10 minutes a night per grade level — from about 10 minutes in first grade up to a maximum of about two hours in high school. Both the National Education Association and National Parent Teacher Association support that limit.

Beyond that point, kids don't absorb much useful information, Cooper says. In fact, too much homework can do more harm than good. Researchers have cited drawbacks, including boredom and burnout toward academic material, less time for family and extracurricular activities, lack of sleep and increased stress.

In a recent study of Spanish students, Rubén Fernández-Alonso, PhD, and colleagues found that students who were regularly assigned math and science homework scored higher on standardized tests. But when kids reported having more than 90 to 100 minutes of homework per day, scores declined ( Journal of Educational Psychology , 2015).

"At all grade levels, doing other things after school can have positive effects," Cooper says. "To the extent that homework denies access to other leisure and community activities, it's not serving the child's best interest."

Children of all ages need down time in order to thrive, says Denise Pope, PhD, a professor of education at Stanford University and a co-founder of Challenge Success, a program that partners with secondary schools to implement policies that improve students' academic engagement and well-being.

"Little kids and big kids need unstructured time for play each day," she says. Certainly, time for physical activity is important for kids' health and well-being. But even time spent on social media can help give busy kids' brains a break, she says.

All over the map

But are teachers sticking to the 10-minute rule? Studies attempting to quantify time spent on homework are all over the map, in part because of wide variations in methodology, Pope says.

A 2014 report by the Brookings Institution examined the question of homework, comparing data from a variety of sources. That report cited findings from a 2012 survey of first-year college students in which 38.4 percent reported spending six hours or more per week on homework during their last year of high school. That was down from 49.5 percent in 1986 ( The Brown Center Report on American Education , 2014).

The Brookings report also explored survey data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which asked 9-, 13- and 17-year-old students how much homework they'd done the previous night. They found that between 1984 and 2012, there was a slight increase in homework for 9-year-olds, but homework amounts for 13- and 17-year-olds stayed roughly the same, or even decreased slightly.

Yet other evidence suggests that some kids might be taking home much more work than they can handle. Robert Pressman, PhD, and colleagues recently investigated the 10-minute rule among more than 1,100 students, and found that elementary-school kids were receiving up to three times as much homework as recommended. As homework load increased, so did family stress, the researchers found ( American Journal of Family Therapy , 2015).

Many high school students also seem to be exceeding the recommended amounts of homework. Pope and Galloway recently surveyed more than 4,300 students from 10 high-achieving high schools. Students reported bringing home an average of just over three hours of homework nightly ( Journal of Experiential Education , 2013).

On the positive side, students who spent more time on homework in that study did report being more behaviorally engaged in school — for instance, giving more effort and paying more attention in class, Galloway says. But they were not more invested in the homework itself. They also reported greater academic stress and less time to balance family, friends and extracurricular activities. They experienced more physical health problems as well, such as headaches, stomach troubles and sleep deprivation. "Three hours per night is too much," Galloway says.

In the high-achieving schools Pope and Galloway studied, more than 90 percent of the students go on to college. There's often intense pressure to succeed academically, from both parents and peers. On top of that, kids in these communities are often overloaded with extracurricular activities, including sports and clubs. "They're very busy," Pope says. "Some kids have up to 40 hours a week — a full-time job's worth — of extracurricular activities." And homework is yet one more commitment on top of all the others.

"Homework has perennially acted as a source of stress for students, so that piece of it is not new," Galloway says. "But especially in upper-middle-class communities, where the focus is on getting ahead, I think the pressure on students has been ratcheted up."

Yet homework can be a problem at the other end of the socioeconomic spectrum as well. Kids from wealthier homes are more likely to have resources such as computers, Internet connections, dedicated areas to do schoolwork and parents who tend to be more educated and more available to help them with tricky assignments. Kids from disadvantaged homes are more likely to work at afterschool jobs, or to be home without supervision in the evenings while their parents work multiple jobs, says Lea Theodore, PhD, a professor of school psychology at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. They are less likely to have computers or a quiet place to do homework in peace.

"Homework can highlight those inequities," she says.

Quantity vs. quality

One point researchers agree on is that for all students, homework quality matters. But too many kids are feeling a lack of engagement with their take-home assignments, many experts say. In Pope and Galloway's research, only 20 percent to 30 percent of students said they felt their homework was useful or meaningful.

"Students are assigned a lot of busywork. They're naming it as a primary stressor, but they don't feel it's supporting their learning," Galloway says.

"Homework that's busywork is not good for anyone," Cooper agrees. Still, he says, different subjects call for different kinds of assignments. "Things like vocabulary and spelling are learned through practice. Other kinds of courses require more integration of material and drawing on different skills."

But critics say those skills can be developed with many fewer hours of homework each week. Why assign 50 math problems, Pope asks, when 10 would be just as constructive? One Advanced Placement biology teacher she worked with through Challenge Success experimented with cutting his homework assignments by a third, and then by half. "Test scores didn't go down," she says. "You can have a rigorous course and not have a crazy homework load."

Still, changing the culture of homework won't be easy. Teachers-to-be get little instruction in homework during their training, Pope says. And despite some vocal parents arguing that kids bring home too much homework, many others get nervous if they think their child doesn't have enough. "Teachers feel pressured to give homework because parents expect it to come home," says Galloway. "When it doesn't, there's this idea that the school might not be doing its job."

Galloway argues teachers and school administrators need to set clear goals when it comes to homework — and parents and students should be in on the discussion, too. "It should be a broader conversation within the community, asking what's the purpose of homework? Why are we giving it? Who is it serving? Who is it not serving?"

Until schools and communities agree to take a hard look at those questions, those backpacks full of take-home assignments will probably keep stirring up more feelings than facts.

Further reading

• Cooper, H., Robinson, J. C., & Patall, E. A. (2006). Does homework improve academic achievement? A synthesis of research, 1987-2003. Review of Educational Research, 76 (1), 1–62. doi: 10.3102/00346543076001001
• Galloway, M., Connor, J., & Pope, D. (2013). Nonacademic effects of homework in privileged, high-performing high schools. The Journal of Experimental Education, 81 (4), 490–510. doi: 10.1080/00220973.2012.745469
• Pope, D., Brown, M., & Miles, S. (2015). Overloaded and underprepared: Strategies for stronger schools and healthy, successful kids . San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

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What’s the point of homework?

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Homework hasn’t changed much in the past few decades. Most children are still sent home with about an hour’s worth of homework each day, mostly practising what they were taught in class.

If we look internationally, homework is assigned in every country that participated in the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) in 2012.

Across the participating countries, 15-year-old students reported spending almost five hours per week doing homework in 2012. Australian students spent six hours per week on average on homework. Students in Singapore spent seven hours on homework, and in Shanghai, China they did homework for about 14 hours per week on average.

Read more: Aussie students are a year behind students 10 years ago in science, maths and reading

Shanghai and Singapore routinely score higher than Australia in the PISA maths, science and reading tests. But homework could just be one of the factors leading to higher results. In Finland, which also scores higher than Australia, students spent less than three hours on homework per week.

So, what’s the purpose of homework and what does the evidence say about whether it fulfils its purpose?

Why do teachers set homework?

Each school in Australia has its own homework policy developed in consultation with teachers and parents or caregivers, under the guiding principles of state or regional education departments.

For instance, according to the New South Wales homework policy “… tasks should be assigned by teachers with a specific, explicit learning purpose”.

Homework in NSW should also be “purposeful and designed to meet specific learning goals”, and “built on knowledge, skills and understanding developed in class”. But there is limited, if any, guidance on how often homework should be set.

Research based on teacher interviews shows they set homework for a range of reasons. These include to:

establish and improve communication between parents and children about learning

help children be more responsible, confident and disciplined

practise or review material from class

determine children’s understanding of the lesson and/or skills

introduce new material to be presented in class

provide students with opportunities to apply and integrate skills to new situations or interest areas

get students to use their own skills to create work.

So, does homework achieve what teachers intend it to?

Do we know if it ‘works’?

Studies on homework are frequently quite general, and don’t consider specific types of homework tasks. So it isn’t easy to measure how effective homework could be, or to compare studies.

But there are several things we can say.

First, it’s better if every student gets the kind of homework task that benefits them personally, such as one that helps them answer questions they had, or understand a problem they couldn’t quite grasp in class. This promotes students’ confidence and control of their own learning.

Read more: Learning from home is testing students' online search skills. Here are 3 ways to improve them

Giving students repetitive tasks may not have much value . For instance, calculating the answer to 120 similar algorithms, such as adding two different numbers 120 times may make the student think maths is irrelevant and boring. In this case, children are not being encouraged to find solutions but simply applying a formula they learnt in school.

In primary schools, homework that aims to improve children’s confidence and learning discipline can be beneficial. For example, children can be asked to practise giving a presentation on a topic of their interest. This could help build their competence in speaking in front of a class.

Homework can also highlight equity issues. It can be particularly burdensome for socioeconomically disadvantaged students who may not have a space, the resources or as much time due to family and work commitments. Their parents may also not feel capable of supporting them or have their own work commitments.

According to the PISA studies mentioned earlier, socioeconomically disadvantaged 15 year olds spend nearly three hours less on homework each week than their advantaged peers.

Read more: 'I was astonished at how quickly they made gains': online tutoring helps struggling students catch up

What kind of homework is best?

Homework can be engaging and contribute to learning if it is more than just a sheet of maths or list of spelling words not linked to class learning. From summarising various studies’ findings, “good” homework should be:

personalised to each child rather than the same for all students in the class. This is more likely to make a difference to a child’s learning and performance

achievable, so the child can complete it independently, building skills in managing their time and behaviour

aligned to the learning in the classroom.

If you aren’t happy with the homework your child is given then approach the school. If your child is having difficulty with doing the homework, the teacher needs to know. It shouldn’t be burdensome for you or your children.

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Knowing that most students submit assignments right around the deadline, is it advisable not to set deadline that is very late at night?

Like many on this site, I use a Moodle-type online Content Management System to give assignments to my students, and receive the finished work for grading. This is in a traditional context where the students are physically present in the classroom, and the online part is seen as a simple tool to be used in addition to the classic paper-based route. Students' first class for the day usually begins at 8 a.m.

For the last few years, I put the deadline for assignment acceptance at midnight, with plenty of time (2-3 weeks) to do the work, so each student can handle his/her workload as they wish. These are young adults aged 18-25, and are in theory very much responsible for their acts. Observation gives us actual hand-in times with approximately the following distribution:

• 1-2 days before deadline: 5%
• 3-24 hours before: 10%
• 1-2 hours: 10%
• less than 1 hour: 65%
• emails in distress after the deadline has expired saying they have encountered a computer glitch or some other excuse: 10%

Which I guess is about par for the course. :-(

So it is clear that while in theory these students are responsible young adults, in practice they tend to plan ahead in a less than stellar way. The impression that is perceived is that the online nature of the submission system makes students take slightly more liberties with deadlines than when assignments had to be handed in, in a face-to-face situation - although it is clear that even then there will always be a certain percentage of people with difficulties respecting deadlines.

OK, here is the question: without getting into considerations on whether students should plan better (and possible ways in which I and other teachers could help them do so), would changing deadline times from midnight to, for example, 10 p.m. be a good move from the standpoint of their getting enough sleep (moral considerations welcome) and actually attending class at the beginning of the next day? Do I get to patent this Great Idea?

No, that last bit was a joke. ;-)

Reactions from people who are not actually teachers, but have experienced this context as a student are also welcome.

I have ended up accepting the answer by Superbest below, basically because I liked his discussion of alternative possibilities. This is a bit subjective, since many other answers are also of very high quality IMHO - and I would certainly encourage the reader to peruse all the answers given here, and the varying points of view expressed (also in comments). Much appreciated.

• online-learning

• 28 I had to take a take-home exam when I was 25. There was no Internet (this was almost 40 years ago). I had to run 3 miles (about 5 km) trying to meet the 8 a.m. deadline. Yes, I was a responsible adult (I swear). No matter what your schedule is, your observed distribution would look about the same. So, I would suggest move the deadline to 8 p.m. so the students would have plenty of time to get on social media or play games after they submit their assignments.;-) –  Nobody Commented Aug 6, 2015 at 8:27
• 19 Considering the concept of deadlines itself, I really like the idea described elsewhere on this site (or on Math Educators) a while ago to slowly worsen the grade of late submissions until they automatically fail. So you can still get a decent grade for submitting 10 minutes late but not for submitting 48 hours late (depending on the total length of the assignment, of course). Also, I think that computer glitches are today’s “the dog ate my homework” and should not be a valid excuse. –  Wrzlprmft ♦ Commented Aug 6, 2015 at 12:41
• 71 One trivial advantage of 10pm over midnight - no danger of someone getting confused over which day is meant! –  Andrew is gone Commented Aug 6, 2015 at 16:05
• 50 As a student, I am usually part of that 65% who turn their hw in last minute, but it's not because it took that long, it's just that I am usually paranoid about handing in something earlier than I have to and then realizing that I made a mistake or could have done better. So, I tend to turn assignments in last minute, although I finished them much earlier. –  dramzy Commented Aug 6, 2015 at 17:19
• 22 As a somewhat recent student, one reason why I often submitted close to the midnight deadline was that evenings and late nights were often when I had the time to work. If a deadline were set to be earlier in the day when I had classes and activities to attend, then I would be much more likely to submit the night before with plenty of time to spare. Then again, that might mean I would just stay up until 3 instead of 12 :) –  David K Commented Aug 6, 2015 at 18:46

18 Answers 18

While I admire your concern for the students, I feel that ultimately your endeavor is quixotic.

To be sure, I see nothing wrong with making your deadline be at 10 pm. It won't change anything, so you might as well. But I wouldn't expect it to have any notable effect, and I would be wary of the slippery slope that leads to you blaming yourself for the students' errors.

The reason I am so pessimistic is that I don't think procrastination and irregular sleep are caused by deadline timing (unless the work demanded is truly overwhelming, but in college it never is ). They are caused by poor personal discipline and bad habits acquired over many years leading up to the present. Regardless of what you do, the procrastinators will still invent ways to procrastinate, because the problem is rooted in their own behavior, not yours. You therefore cannot solve the problem by changing your behavior.

For instance, if you have the deadline at 10 pm, the procrastinator will drop everything that evening to work on your assignment and submit it around 10. Then he will still stay up doing the things he just postponed for the sake of your assignment. Because, recall, this person is not selectively procrastinating on your course only - they have also other courses that have deadlines. Even if all courses had the same early deadline policy, the students would still have their own errands with self-imposed deadlines at later times that they stay up for.

By the same logic that makes you consider 10 pm, we can explore other alternatives:

• 5 pm is a fair time, since it would presumably encourage students to concentrate their last ditch effort in the typical working day. However, there will also be students who have classes right up to the deadline that day, and if they procrastinate (as some certainly shall) they will now skip class to do the assignment, which is arguably worse than staying up!
• Noon is another time that sounds like a good idea. Being too early, you might expect that it will make students feel they have no choice but to start working on it early since the morning isn't nearly enough time, and if they can't finish it the night before they can safely go to bed, get some sleep, and finish in the morning. But realistically, the procrastinators who stay up late and hand it in at midnight now will just start working at 1 am and stay up all night to finish it.
• 9 am can be argued for as a realistic time - it's not like you will start grading at midnight, so there isn't really a point in requiring the assignment by midnight - instead of having the students rush their submission to a deadline just so it could sit in your mailbox for several hours, you could tell them to that you will start grading at 9 am and they should have it done by then. This makes the deadline less arbitrary, since there is now a clear logic to being required to meet it (ie. you will be delayed if they don't do their part). But of course you will again have the same problem of students staying up all night because they procrastinated.

For what it's worth, I think the midnight deadline came about as codification of an unspoken tradition. Often deadlines are given as days, without time - with this, there is always much controversy about what exactly counts as meeting an August 6 deadline: Does it have to be done at the beginning of Aug 6? Does it have to be before the instructor leaves the office? Does it have to be before the end of the day, ie. before you go to sleep? Well, what if you never go to sleep, can you squeeze out a few more hours and still "meet your Aug 6 deadline" by submitting at 3:14 am on [technically] Aug 7?

Even though informally "today" means "until I go to sleep", the convention is that the date changes at midnight, which is also reinforced by how computer clocks show the date. Hence, I think the midnight deadline came about as an extension of this - it's just a date delimiter.

As for the students, since you are concerned about how late they go to sleep, surely you will agree that planning ahead and not leaving everything to the last minute is an important skill to be learned as part of tertiary education. This, then, the students must learn on their own, you cannot help them by tinkering with deadlines, since indeed the deadline is not what is preventing their learning. In fact, one could argue that you should maximize the negative reinforcement, and set the deadline at the worst possible time - say 6 am: The more misery you inflict on the procrastinators, the better they will appreciate how important it is to learn discipline, and the sooner they will take steps to unlearn their bad habits.

Granted, I'm not seriously suggesting you do the above, since it seems like it could go horribly wrong. Realistically, I could instead suggest the following:

• Set your deadline at some reasonable, early time such as noon.
• Secretly (ie. do not tell this part to the students) have the "real deadline" (for instance, the one you lose points for missing) be quite a bit later, say 5 pm.
• In class, say that it is very important they not miss the deadline even by a minute (don't say why), and they should come talk to you if they feel they won't make it.
• When they inevitably come asking for more time, be liberal with the extensions, but not before making them explain why they were late and lecturing them on the importance of planning ahead. When giving the extension, explain that they absolutely cannot miss the extended deadline, because then you would not be able to meet your own deadline for grading (whether true or not).
• If anyone misses the noon deadline (but not the 5 pm deadline), confront them about it to discourage submitting late without asking for an extension (which allows bypassing the social discomfort of asking for more time).

With this, you might create something like a low stakes environment (you don't lose massive points just for being a few minutes late) while still creating a fair amount of social pressure to increase the likelihood of a lightbulb appearing and the student thinking, "Hey, Dr. Ward is very nice and reasonable about deadlines and everything, but maybe it's worth for me to try to stop leaving everything to the last minute?". Furthermore, if you force them into an explicit discussion about their procrastination, they have an opportunity to ask you for advice on how to plan their work.

But all of this requires quite a bit of effort from you (much more than just replacing "midnight" with "10 pm" on your syllabus). So if you are not willing to commit the energy, there isn't really much that can be achieved with quick fixes.

• 3 Basically, you are recommending a holistic approach to the way I use the online platform, am I not correct? ;-) Fair enough. Since I cannot handle the complete discussion in one step, I will be concentrating separately on each aspect. But you are very right to comment on the fact it is a complete process with many aspects to it. –  ALAN WARD Commented Aug 6, 2015 at 20:02
• 44 "...unless the work demanded is truly overwhelming, but in college it never is..." I feel the need to say that this is largely a matter of opinion. What is a piece of cake to one person could very well overwhelm another person. Just because you never got/get overwhelmed by college doesn't mean that nobody does. However, I realize this does not invalidate your answer, nor does it even invalidate the first part of the sentence saying that lack of sleep is probably not tied to the timing of deadlines. –  PrinceTyke Commented Aug 7, 2015 at 12:20
• 6 Imagine a single parent with a full-time job who is also going to school full-time. It is certainly possible that they could get overwhelmed at some point. I like your answer other than that part. –  Benjamin Hubbard Commented Aug 7, 2015 at 14:39
• 5 +1 to @PrinceTyke, -1 to this answer. Overwhelming is a relative term. Also, you're way too pessimistic about people's reasons for their habits and generally the whole thing. –  user541686 Commented Aug 7, 2015 at 21:00
• 3 "and not leaving everything to the last minute is an important skill to be learned as part of tertiary education" -- I learned this is an incredibly effective way of getting s*** done in college. One semester Sundays 8pm - 4am was one problem set, Thursdays 6pm - 6am was another, A's in both courses. Now I go to work and generally do work doing the day so not at night, so it's moot. And as far not procrastinating on things like going to the DMV, getting bloodwork done, paying rent on time, etc., those have nothing to do with things I learned in college. –  user18072 Commented Aug 9, 2015 at 22:19

First of all, I think the distribution that you're seeing is not very unusual, and indeed looks very similar to the distribution of times that I see coming from mature scientists submitting conference papers and grants.

It is simply that people, including your students, tend to overcommit themselves and to underestimate the difficulty of work. When that is combined with tasks on which there is a flexible amount of effort that can be invested (e.g., quality of work on an assignment), it is generally the case that "this work is done" is an ill-defined notion, and instead it gets triaged at some point of time shortly before the assignment. Better and more prepared students (or whoever) simply climb farther up in quality before triaging.

Given that, I generally advocate for a policy of "tight deadlines, lots of mercy." That means setting the deadline slightly before when you really want the assignment turned in, and then being very liberal about accepting requests for extension up until your secret "real deadline."

Addressing your specific question about timing, I think that if you want your students to get more sleep, moving the deadline up a couple of hours is a totally reasonable tactic: given the phenomena at work, it is unlikely to affect the distribution or quality of the assignments you receive. Depending on how your automated system works, you may also be able to explicitly support an official deadline of 10pm, with the de facto ability to leave the submission system open longer to receive the main tranche of "just a little bit late" assignments.

• 3 Yes, this strategy is indeed possible with our (Moodle-based) system. The only point that hinders me in applying it is the fact that students will rapidly become aware of the rules actually being applied. It is worth some thought, though - and the analysis is well appreciated. –  ALAN WARD Commented Aug 6, 2015 at 12:12
• 81 I think this is unfair to students who take deadlines seriously. If they had problems with a homework, they would turn in what they had shortly before the stated deadline. They lose the points they could have gained if they had known the real deadline, and taken a few more hours. –  Patricia Shanahan Commented Aug 6, 2015 at 13:29
• 28 A good policy they had at my university was staggered penalties. IIRC you'd lose 1 point out of 22 for missing the deadline, no excuses, then another point for each additional 24 hours. So those who overcommit learn a valuable life lesson without their work being completely wasted, and those who plan ahead are rewarded. And if, like me, you discover a catestrophic error 24 hours before deadline, you make a tradeoff between submitting fixed work a day late at -1 point and incorrect work on time at -?? points –  user56reinstatemonica8 Commented Aug 6, 2015 at 14:17
• 21 Set the official deadline to 22:00 and let the system accept submissions until 22:30 - this will not really be unfair to diligent students, because 30min will not likely decide between life&dead - but many students will be happy akin wow... already 21:59 and the internet is slow as hell.... 22:03 uploading - yeah I got lucky it sill worked! –  Falco Commented Aug 6, 2015 at 14:48
• 15 @O.R.Mapper you can easily add this as a benefit rather than penalty - if your submission is more than 3 days before the deadline you get 3 extra points for free. Because with an overall assignemtn time of 3 weeks, most students start to work on the problem 1-2 days before deadline... so either you start early to get the bonus, or you are already one of the late ones and don't complain if someone was 20minutes slower... –  Falco Commented Aug 6, 2015 at 14:51

I would consider a deadline at around 10p.m. very wise and student-friendly. I remember staying up late night as long as the submission system allows to post a new version and polishing the hell out of my assignment, although it probably made little difference.

As a lecturer I have always readily given small extensions to people who asked at least a little (about a day) in advance before the deadline, because I think that this fosters good habits in life: it is OK to fail sometimes, but you should handle the failure responsibly and warn people depending on you in advance.

I like the "tight deadlines, lots of mercy" policy mentioned in another answer (which I think is one of the good solutions). If you are worried that students will learn and exploit this policy, you can have a deadline that is openly less strict: for example subtracting 10 points from the evaluation of the assignment for every hour of delay or letting the students to submit until the next lecture, but for half the points. I experienced this a few times as a student and it was motivational yet forgiving to small lapses.

• 1 Nice solution. I have applied at times a variant, which is to waive the penalty the first time - but not on successive occasions. As you say, I was aiming for the motivational aspect. –  ALAN WARD Commented Aug 6, 2015 at 12:35
• 2 +1 for the second paragraph; this advice is especially useful in professional life. If you have a team of people waiting for 'your piece', then letting them know in advance that you won't have it ready until a day after the deadline is nothing but helpful. At that point, they can work on something else that doesn't need your piece. This applies to group projects especially (university or professional). –  Chris Cirefice Commented Aug 7, 2015 at 15:27

I'd like to add my two cents as a current student with three years of college behind me. In my experience, I've always preferred having a deadline of midnight to a deadline of 10pm because during the school year, I'm often up until midnight regardless, and sometimes my workload requires me to prioritize my assignments in such a way that many things get submitted in the eleventh hour, so to speak. Furthermore, I tend to do much of my work in the late evening, as that's when I personally am able to focus on assignments the best. This experience comes from three years from a Computer Science undergrad, so take it with whatever that information brings. I think the deadline will mean different things to different students regardless of when it actually is, and I think students will still end up submitting just before the deadline is due, but I personally prefer midnight to 10pm.

• 3 Agreed; also as a Computer Science undergrad, our CS labs are usually just about empty between 8 PM and midnight. I don't like to work from home because there are too many distractions, and an empty CS lab at night is the perfect working environment (for me). Those are the only assignments that I put off (which is a bad idea because coding is prone to a million errors for simple mistakes), but for me it makes the most sense to do that. Midnight for me is a good deadline time. –  Chris Cirefice Commented Aug 7, 2015 at 15:29
• 1 I completely agree with the sentiment that an empty (I'll settle for simply sparsely-populated, provided I have some headphones) CS lab at night is the perfect working environment. Putting off programming assignments is awful, but I think the vast majority of CS students do so. I know I do. –  PrinceTyke Commented Aug 7, 2015 at 15:36
• @ChrisCirefice, I have fond memories of allnighters in the computer lab to which I had a key as a graduate student, as regular labs were closed and the machines weren't hopelessly overloaded at night. But there was no staff on hand to unwedge your account (happened regularly as a result of some stupid command combinations). That was time to go home ;-) –  vonbrand Commented Aug 26, 2015 at 20:37

As a PhD candidate who has taught (as in was the primary lecturer, not just a TA) and recently taken classes I have a different opinion than to move assignments to an early time, e.g. 10PM. My solution for a programming intensive class that I taught was to make the assignments always due at 5AM on Saturday. I picked Saturday specifically because if they wanted to stay up late it would not affect attending class that day. My reasoning behind the 5AM time was that the time you make assignments due can actually relate to your late policy.

By making assignments due at 5AM on Saturday I could be very strict about late assignments. My late policy was simple: it's late, it's a zero grade, no exceptions . I had a script that would grab all the assignments at 5:02AM (okay so they got a 2 minute window) and that was the only thing I would look at. If they submitted at 5:04AM it was never graded. If a student would come back and complain that they just missed the deadline my response was simple:

Look you had all night to work on the assignment and you obviously had to stay up extremely late which means you didn't budget your time well or you thought it would be so simple you could do it in a night. Both of those assumptions were wrong. I hope for the next assignment you do not make the same mistake.

Finally, I had a draconian late policy (which might be a bit off topic to the question but is relevant to my answer) for a very simple reason. As a TA who has had to grade countless number of homework assignments, you spend probably about 25% to 50% of your time dealing with the 5% of the assignments that were late, either because you have to schedule a demo on a different day than the rest, or you have to go back to problems to see how you previously took points of for a (semi-)wrong answer, etc. This is a huge unnecessary drain on human resources and can greatly affect research progress. Now this usually doesn't matter if the assignment is just 5 minutes late but by having a strict late policy I avoided all the: "it was only a day late can I get partial credit", arguments and those assignments do add an unnecessary burden on grader/TA.

And as for how this policy works in practice. Per semester, I usually have only one student submit one assignment that is just barely late, say submitted after 5AM and before 5:30AM. The rest get a very clear picture.

I should add that this policy did result in piazza , which we used for class communication, exploding the night the assignment was due but I made it very clear to the students that after 9PM I was not answering any piazza or email questions. If they wanted to use piazza to ask each other questions that was fine but I did not participate.

• 1 Yours seems like yet another good justification for moving the deadline into the middle of a night. The only slight disadvantage that I could see with having it on a Saturday night is that (probably (?)) you aren't going to grade the assignments on Sunday, anyway, and some students may specifically plan to use their weekend, including Sundays, for working on assignments. On the other hand, it might of course help them arrive at a work-on-Saturday-get-a-free-Sunday schedule to some extent. –  O. R. Mapper Commented Aug 6, 2015 at 18:51
• 5 @O.R.Mapper actually it was due on Saturday 5AM specifically so I could use the weekend to grade and have the grades given back by Monday, when the class would meet. This reaffirmed the "its done don't talk to be about an extension" mindset. You could push it back 24 hours so it was due on Sunday at 5AM, same idea basically. –  missimer Commented Aug 6, 2015 at 18:55
• Oh, and one remark on your text: I take it "piazza" is the name of your online submission system, but it suddenly appears somewhat out of nowhere in your last paragraph. –  O. R. Mapper Commented Aug 6, 2015 at 19:18
• 2 @ALANWARD actually the assignments were somewhat large, 3-4 weeks, but I did automate some of the grading as it was a programming class. I would argue that it would work if it took longer to grade as that was not a key thing in my experience just a nice bonus, but I can't say with any level of certainty. If the assignments took longer to grade, perhaps students would argue for the assignment to be extended to include the weekend. –  missimer Commented Aug 6, 2015 at 20:01
• 1 5am on Saturday morning seems an excellent time. Nobody can claim with a straight face that they intended to work until five minutes before the deadline and were a bit too late if the deadline is at 5am in the morning. –  gnasher729 Commented Aug 8, 2015 at 8:26

Without getting into considerations on whether students should plan better [...] would changing deadline times from midnight to, for example, 10 p.m. be a good move from the standpoint of their getting enough sleep.

Most likely, yes, students on average would get more sleep. I was TAing a class last term (a computer science class for 4th-year undergraduate students in college), the weekly assignment deadline was 10 AM on Sunday. Here is the typical submission time cumulative distribution we would get:

As we discussed with the professor when to set the deadline, we simply based our decision on when the assignments would be graded, and left students freedom to organize their schedule. While some need to sleep early, others prefer to work at night.

• 4 Please, is the graph cumulative? Does it show number of submissions submitted until time t or number of submissions submitted around time t ? –  yo' Commented Aug 7, 2015 at 7:56
• 1 @yo' cumulative –  Franck Dernoncourt Commented Aug 7, 2015 at 15:44

I suggest the opposite course of action by moving the deadline further into the night. Set it at a time where no-one voluntarily would want to hand in their work. In my opinion, that is the best incentive to have them reconsider their personal scheduling.

As for the online system, you write:

The impression that is perceived is that the online nature of the submission system makes students take slightly more liberties with deadlines than when assignments had to be handed in, in a face-to-face situation

I suspect this is coupled to how the online system is generally presented, as I have made the opposite experience. We generally communicate a very strict "hand in via the system, or do not hand in at all" policy. That is, e-mails will generally not be accepted as an alternative to submission via the system (as long as the system is not actually having internal technical issues). As opposed to e-mails, where there is always a certain leeway for asking for exceptional treatment along the lines of "the e-mail sent at 09:59 was routed in a way so it only arrived at 10:01", when the online system is announced to close down at 10, it will automatically close down at 10 (ideally, while displaying the server time in its web-based interface). This way, non-uniform acceptance of delayed submissions between different instructors for one class is avoided.

although it is clear that even then there will always be a certain percentage of people with difficulties respecting deadlines

Indeed, unfortunately, that is unavoidable - but as being able to stick to deadlines is one of the factors expected of a professional, these people simply will not get their degree in the end.

would changing deadline times from midnight to, for example, 10 p.m. be a good move from the standpoint of their getting enough sleep (moral considerations welcome) and actually attending class at the beginning of the next day?

I would somewhat doubt it. A pattern that I seem to perceive in people around me, both students and non-students, is that either they work until late at night and are very exhausted from that, or they work slightly shorter, are not totally exhausted ... and instead stay up doing whatever they like doing until they are equally exhausted. Maybe yours is not even the only deadline in the same evening, and changing your deadline only changes the order in which the tasks will be treated. I simply do not see a strong connection between your submission deadline and the time they actually go to bed.

EDIT: Reading Ángel's answer made me aware that it cannot be taken for granted in an online submission system that students can replace their submission once they have uploaded something. I consider such a feature essential. I am fully in favour of encouraging students to plan thoroughly and be on time, but if a satisfactory submission that solves the declared task has been made well within the deadline, I see no point in disallowing the respective student from replacing it with an updated version that is even a bit more tidy or well-explained.

• Interesting take on the problem. You make an assessment of the email system that corresponds very well to what we have observed here: it is just does not precise enough (as regards timing) to use it for submissions. However, as regards enforcing a very strict system, unfortunately some excuses will inevitably be receivable ("my father just died" has happened to me - and it was actually true :-( ). So, we are back to the dilemma of where do we draw the line between receivable and non-receivable reasons. Hmmm... some flexibility seems unavoidable. –  ALAN WARD Commented Aug 6, 2015 at 14:08
• @ALANWARD: Well, it may be a question of how obvious the path to stating the excuses are. E-mail is a means of communication, and accordingly, students may readily use it not only to submit their homework, but also to communicate why it is arriving late. A web-based submission form that does not allow for any "message", on the other hand, may not to the same extent signal readiness to accept any additional information, and it is primarily only students that actually have compelling reasons for excuses that will, in addition to the submission, send a message some other way. With that said, ... –  O. R. Mapper Commented Aug 6, 2015 at 14:11
• ... in cases like the one you alluded to we usually do not extend the submission deadline, but rather tell the respective people to wait until the end of the semester. Should they be missing points compared to the score required for "passing" the course, we can work something out then (e.g. a brief oral exam, or an extra task, ...). That minimizes the administrative hassle and does not imply any penalty for the student. (Of course, it works only if the overall course result is binary, or discrete enough for a missing submission not to have any effect.) –  O. R. Mapper Commented Aug 6, 2015 at 14:14
• @O.R.Mapper, passing is not sufficient for most students in the US. Grades are basically numerical scores in the end, so good students have the right to try to maximize them. I agree that we can accommodate true emergencies, but it often has to be in a way equivalent to them having handed in on time. –  Bill Barth Commented Aug 6, 2015 at 15:57
• @BillBarth: In such a case, a more immediate solution is probably adviseable indeed. In my place, the system mostly works by each course coming with assignments during the semester from which a score can be accumulated, and only if a minimum score is reached from those assignments (thus making this a binary choice), the student is allowed to take the exam on the course, which will then result in a grade (a numerical score) that will form a part of the final degree grade (also a numerical score). Hence, there are some places where binary decisions sometimes appear, as a preliminary step. –  O. R. Mapper Commented Aug 6, 2015 at 16:07

Remember: it's not your duty to clean your students noses and make sure they submit everything on time or weeks before the deadline. If you want to be merciful you can apply increasing penalties or you can set a hard cutoff if you're not feeling merciful. You'll probably get less pleading emails and headaches if you apply a sliding scale of penalties but it's up to you and you shouldn't feel you have to.

You have no duty to hand everyone a pass. Don't feel bad if some people screw themselves over by not submitting on time.

I encountered lots of variation as a student and have few strong feelings about it though I always somewhat preferred late-night deadlines because I worked better in the evening.

As long as the deadlines don't change: the only time a deadline ever pissed me off was when the professor kept changing it. 3 weeks, no 2 weeks, no 4 weeks, no 1 week etc.

• 2 You have no duty to hand everyone a pass. He is being paid to teach them. So you could say it is his duty to have as many pass as possible. Every failed student is a failed teacher, to some degree. –  Jonathon Commented Aug 10, 2015 at 17:37
• 3 @JonathonWisnoski no, if he was teaching 4 year olds that might be true but at collage the students are adults. He's being paid to provide an opportunity to learn and an opportunity for the person to prove they've learned. If people don't take one or the other opportunity when provided with a fair chance that is 100% on them. Universities also provide a third service to the rest of society: They certify that their graduates were competent enough to pass a university course. If they pass someone too inept to hand in assignments they've failed utterly in that last duty. –  Murphy Commented Aug 10, 2015 at 19:16

I have dealt with this issue in setting closing times for Webwork assignments, which is a kind of online Content Management System specific to mathematics.

After having tried out various times, I have converged on 7pm. Why?

Originally I had it due at 5pm. There is something about 5pm that is hard to complain about: in the US it is widely regarded as the end of the work day. It is the latest in the day you could set a meeting or an appointment without apologizing or confirming in advance that it is okay. There is a wide cultural feeling that people should be working until 5pm, at which point they want to go home.

Well, I said hard to complain about. The complaints I got were that people were submitting their solutions at 4:59:47 and not getting accepted by the system. Such complaints are very hard to verify (especially if you don't try) and pretty annoying. So what I said was, "You should think of the assignment as being due at 5pm and work accordingly. The extra two hours is a grace period that will nullify any technical difficulties."

Two other benefits of having roughly this due time:

1) If students want to ask questions before it's due (or rather, until 5pm), those questions will come during my normal work day. I might get a chance to answer them, and I certainly will not resent them. It can be annoying to get an email at 11:47pm for an assignment which is due at midnight with the implication that if you do not reply in time you are impeding their learning.

2) I post the solutions after a two hour delay. This time frame makes it more feasible to push back the due date a few hours before the deadline if that really seems like a good idea. If the due time were, say, 3 am, this would not be as convenient.

• 6 As a current student and full time worker I think 5 pm is way too early for a due date, this would force me to have to finish the assignment the night before because I work all day. I think midnight is much more flexible and fair to night owls like me –  reggaeguitar Commented Aug 6, 2015 at 15:41
• 7 @reggaeguitar: Yes, part of the point of this due time is to discourage students from waiting until the last day. There is no problem in finishing the assignment the night before. The number of late nights that you have to do the assignment is the same. –  Pete L. Clark Commented Aug 6, 2015 at 15:55
• 2 Also, I should clarify that this policy was for a course taught in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Georgia. Students who work all day could not attend such courses, since they are only scheduled during the 8am-5pm work day. –  Pete L. Clark Commented Aug 6, 2015 at 16:00
• 3 I've been a procrastinator my whole life and never run into problems because of it; I wait until the last day for literally all of my assignments. In my opinion the teacher's job is to teach, not to "discourage students from waiting until the last day". –  reggaeguitar Commented Aug 6, 2015 at 16:09
• 10 @reggaeguitar: Many instructors believe that encouraging students to spend more time rather than less engaging the material is one of the most important parts of the teaching process. If you stay in academia long enough, you will unavoidably receive assignments that it is literally impossible to complete in a single day, e.g. a PhD dissertation. Even as an undergraduate, if you never receive assignments that require more than one day of work, you are probably missing out on some important learning experiences. Consider whether you are taking courses that really challenge you. –  Pete L. Clark Commented Aug 6, 2015 at 16:17

The system is flexible precisely for allowing that. For those 65% students sending in-the-hour, you can't know if they did it at 23:00 or if they had the assignment ready in their hard disk for a week, but didn't hand in until then.

I agree they are probably doing the work at 23:00, but a big point to take into account shall be their other duties . If yours was their only commitment, the graphic would probably change, but other subjects will be placing their own tasks, they may be practising sports, etc.

The main reason for delaying a task was having many other assignments due earlier. I should also note that if you open a task before it has been fully explained, it will actually deter from trying to complete it early, since you transmit the idea that "it can't be done yet".

I would keep the late hour, or perhaps even move it later (the 5 AM proposal is a good idea).

(Hint: Never place a deadline at day X at 00:00 but to day X-1 at 23:59, there's a big UI factor there)

Another option I initally liked was to place it at 7:59 the next day (just before the begin of the next day), but it has the drawback that you may delay the "final submit" when you wake up, and fail for a "computer error". OTOH, you may allow that way that they can hand it in manually to you the next day (or if your class is at 11:00, the deadline could be at 10:59, thus you can start the class asking for phisical submission of anyone that otherwise failed).

Another point to ids that you should allow, if supported by your platform, multiple "draft" uploads. Make clear that you won't be viewing them (until the deadline passes). Thus, you can submit the almost-ready work, and if there's a catastrophic failure after it gets the final revision, the draft would be considered final (you may eg. miss some spell-checking fixes).

A problem I identified is that as you are only allowed to submit once, you delay for the final version, even if it's almost ready, and then problems kick-in like "it takes too long to upload", "you included too many graphics in png, and the generated file is now over the size limit" (and you end up rushing to change all of them to jpeg). Limits which are not always clearly stated (eg. an email filesize limit, the webmail taking forever for accepting an upload...).

I would also accept that they commit a hash of their work in case they have some upload problem (although your students need to be a bit computer-savvy for that). [They provide before the deadline a hash of the file they are going to turn in, so there's no way they can provide a different file later, even if the upload fails at that point in time]

If you want to encourage early submission, I would provide bonus points for submitting early. Sending an automatic reminder to people who hasn't submitted yet may also improve the submission times (the right timing is very important here, though. The due date shouldn't be far away, and the email should be received at an , you are unlikely to remember at home -or in the weekend!- the email reminder received on Monday morning).

PS: There are cases where the students program meeting during a break previous to the class for doing the task, so I don't think it is right to consider that they take "more liberties with [online] deadlines than when they are handed in in a face-to-face situation".

• I somewhat disagree with your examples for other duties. While it is true there are also other courses with assignments as a part of the studies, at least at my place, university rules generally make it very clear that studying a major is a full-time job that must be granted the first priority in the student's life. Part-time jobs, if any, and hobbies such as practising sports have to be scheduled in a way so as to not conflict with the university courses. At least in such a setting, only another university assignment can serve as a valid excuse. Good point about the option to submit ... –  O. R. Mapper Commented Aug 6, 2015 at 18:43
• ... several versions of an assignment, though. In my answer , I had taken that option for granted, but I will add a remark that such a feature is essential and should always be there. –  O. R. Mapper Commented Aug 6, 2015 at 18:44
• 2 @O.R.Mapper, I was not talking about additionally having a job, but different subjects, all of them setting tasks and fighting for the student time. At least in my experience, teachers tend to be completely unaware of each other assignments, and there's not even one with a whole view of the students duties (even for a "classic" students with the expected subjects). –  Ángel Commented Aug 6, 2015 at 19:28
• @O.R.Mapper And I mentioned sports as a reason for scheduling the assignments late at night. So, with the original midnight deadline, you could plan ahead and probably prefer to practise X at 7pm, after all university courses, and do the assignment later at night, instead of doing the assignment early and playing football at 1am ;) –  Ángel Commented Aug 6, 2015 at 19:32
• Interestingly enough, I can take your comments to heart since I have recently passed another Master's at an online university. This last semester I had four subjects. Most assignments were due on precisely the same day, and the others within a three-day window. So, I agree teachers do not (and perhaps cannot) reliably take into account other subjects' calendars. This is perhaps an area where online systems should allow us to better synchronize, but the underlying problem is complex when handling a large number of subjects and an even larger number of students. –  ALAN WARD Commented Aug 6, 2015 at 19:57

I think midnight is reasonable. I've been known to set certain cut off times with the same thing in mind. My students had to have their online workbooks done by 2:00 am when I started realizing some of them were working on them all night long the night before the test (traditionally due by the start of the test). Because our department policy was 50% late credit for those assignments, I would tell them to just stop at 2:00 and get sleep and take the test fully rested, and finish up their (now late) work the next day.

Back in the day, I'd tend to turn in papers at the last minute, but only because I wanted to have the maximum amount of "rest time" between writing it and doing a final check for those typos you can only find after removing yoursef a bit, so I'd caution against saying they're rushing the writing bit just because they turn it in at the last minute.

The only way you can address people trying to rush to finish an assignment is to have periodic due dates for particular elements of the paper. Not knowing your subject, you could do something like this (not necessarily in sequential days, of course):

• Day 1: general topic defined
• Day 2: preliminary bibliography
• Day 3: 25% ish written
• Day 4: 75% ish written
• Day 5: Completed copy

The first four days could just be checks (rather than graded) so as to not add to your workload.

• OK, basically you are giving the student a bit of extra guidance as to how to manage their time doing the final assignment. This is certainly actually quite helpful and necessary for some students, but perhaps a tad complicated since you now need to think about late submissions for each element of the paper. What happens if the general topic is still in a state of limbo on the day the bibliography is due? Can the students submit the two together? Must they? Decisions, decisions... ;-) –  ALAN WARD Commented Aug 6, 2015 at 19:46
• 2 Do not do this except for very long assignments, and do not do this unless you plan on giving the students feedback on each submission they can use to improve the next (and final) product. Don't assume you can manage your student's time better than they can themselves. They have a lot more information about how they work and their schedule than you ever can. I worked full time to pay the mortgage and feed the kids when I was in school. Any attempts at help like this generally resulted in more late (or sleepless) nights as it forced me to work on the instructor's schedule rather than my own. –  Mr.Mindor Commented Aug 6, 2015 at 22:36
• @Mr.Mindor if a student has a personal situation and communicates it with me in advance, I'm generally willing make reasonable exceptions to policy for them. But when I've tested distributed due dates versus the single one, student evals (and, honestly, quality of work) pushed me towards preferring distributed dates for work. If due dates posted well in advance, a working student can get things done likewise well in advance or make any other adjustments they need. –  user0721090601 Commented Aug 6, 2015 at 23:09

I don't think you should be choosing between 10pm and midnight at all; deadlines should not be in the middle of the night, or the small hours of the morning, or at the weekends or... any time outside a standard working day.

Students are not just at university to get grades; they are also preparing for the rest of their lives in employment and society at large. Also, on the whole, university is not a hobby, it is a full-time job. The messages I'm hearing from your question (and some of the answers) is that it is reasonable to expect to not complete your work until the middle of the night, that it is reasonable to expect others to continue working long after they should have gone home, and that expectations should be adjusted to fit your personal preferences. The last of these will not be true when they start being paid. The other two I personally think are negatively affecting our society. I've become aware of a battle quietly raging over whether it is acceptable to not work overnight, at the weekend and while on holiday.

• Indeed, some active professionals seem be "on duty" 24h/24 and not to have much time for rest and private life at all. I agree this is somewhat not fair. However, I would also like to point out that a student's timetable will typically show some 20+ hours of class, which is not a full work day. If students choose to program their personal study and homework within the 9-to-5 span, fair play to them - they are showing self-discipline which will probably end up in good results. But if they prefer working at night ... I guess I agree with many that is not my business. –  ALAN WARD Commented Aug 7, 2015 at 7:26
• Sorry, no, this is not how it works at many places. University is worse than the true company quite often in that they put really varying workload on the students. Sometimes you get loads of free time, and sometimes you work hard and you can't get around it. Ignoring this as a teacher is plain wrong. Many people simply do work late nights and for students, this is more than usual. It is also given by the fact that at their age, they easily get used to such lifestyle etc. -- this is also not true in industry. –  yo' Commented Aug 7, 2015 at 7:54
• None of that has anything to do with setting a deadline at a sensible time of day rather than in the night time. You can do your work in the night if you want, but you have to do it the night BEFORE the deadline. arguing that the workload varies for students is not relevant to moving a deadline by a few hours, if they're getting at least a week to do the work. –  Jessica B Commented Aug 7, 2015 at 18:38
• And the reason many academics work all night and weekend is it's the only time they can get on with their jobs without students pestering them about the assignments. –  Jessica B Commented Aug 7, 2015 at 18:39
• 2 Young people are typically on a later schedule than older adults, which is one reason they shouldn't be coerced into a 9-5 schedule. –  user18072 Commented Aug 9, 2015 at 22:28

Personally, from my experience as a student, I think midnight is a good deadline. Many students have jobs and other obligations and a midnight deadline gives them time to come home from work, have dinner and unwind and then spend a few hours double checking the assignment before they hand it in.

Moving the deadline to 10pm may not give enough time to students who work.

• 2 well, they have got enough time ... the day before ... and the day before that ... and ... –  yo' Commented Aug 7, 2015 at 7:54
• Almost all comments here from students state that they like to proofread or double check before handing in. I was not referring to actually doing the assignment but just a double check. –  confused Commented Aug 7, 2015 at 17:02

I recommend that you set the deadline to the time that makes the most sense for you. Arbitrarily setting it earlier or later has no effect on student's time management skills.

As an example, I used to set online homework deadlines to be one hour before the class in which we would go over them started. That way, students wouldn't be trying to work on them until the last minute and would be able to get to class on time. That wasn't out of concern for the students - it was for me. I didn't want to deal with "I was doing the homework" as an excuse, or even a temptation, for being late.

Likewise, setting the deadline earlier would have no benefit to me, and would be arbitrary. I don't know what is going on in my students lives, and giving them the maximum possible time to finish the assignment gives them the freedom to manage their time as they see fit.

The only time I deviated from these rules are when I wanted to make sure that multiple classes had the same amount of time to finish an assignment. In that case, it was still for my convenience, since I wanted to use the homework as an evaluation tool and keeping the length of time to work on it consistent helped with that.

If you think about it, the "real world" works this way too - deadlines are not typically set for the convenience or out of concern for the person doing the work. They are there because someone else (the person determining the deadline) needs the work done by a certain time, or something bad will happen.

That said, it is hard to imagine a situation where "at midnight" is a deadline that makes sense for either you or the students.

• This. If you plan to start grading them at 4pm on tuesday, then that is the deadline. –  RemcoGerlich Commented Aug 10, 2015 at 9:48

Having implemented a 10 pm deadline, I think it works fine. I have two comments to make:

• There is no "neutral" answer here. By selecting an hour you are necessarily nudging students in one direction. We cannot get away with this . I suggest you nudge them towards more sleep, also because of point 2.
• I would be very annoyed if another professor puts a deadline that nudges students to have a short night before my class. Students might skip my lecture or be tired at it for working close to the deadline. As such, I think it is a good practice, for solidarity with other courses, to set an earlier rather than later deadline.

Got interested at the point "Moodle-type" (system); If possible, I would recommend keeping midnight and removing the "hard" deadline, i.e. people can still submit after the deadline, but will be highlighted (at least that's how it works in Moodle) and disable the assignment some time later (e.g. the next day), but state that submissions after the deadline will not be accepted. Why?

• 5min off doesn't matter: you can overlook anyone who has a slow connection / forgot to check the clock on their "final sprint" / or whatever
• If someone submits way too late, you can either outright ignore the submission or reduce their points by some value / percentage (e.g. 10% per day)
• Midnight is feasible for some nights-but-not-overnights-action, so people "learn" there is a deadline, but still can act a litlle short-term-ish

There will be people deliberately abusing this, but in the end, they (could) end up with 0 points.

Seen & used this approach in a few courses (both as student and teacher) and had little to no problems with it.

Clarification Note: I also rarely started grading 1 or 2 days after the deadline, if you cannot afford such a time-frame, such a "tolerant" approach might not be suitable.

Submission time may or may not have anything to do with when a student STARTS the assignment, so even the students turning it in at the last minute may not be under pressure.

As long as you give reasonable deadlines and clearly post them to avoid "gotcha" situations, any deadline you give is certainly fair.

Personally, I usually base deadlines on my needs, but make every effort to give the students the most time I can without creating a burdensome situation for myself or my TAs. For example, if I'd like the TAs to be grading over the weekend, I'll usually make the due date late Friday PM. This way, the TAs have time to assemble their weekend work, and if there are students (actually, teams in my case) that need to be tracked down because there was a problem with the submission, there's still time to do it without impacting the work flow.

• 2 A different issue is whether it is reasonable to expect TAs to grade over the weekend. –  J W Commented Aug 7, 2015 at 17:16

You could also consider setting two deadlines: one deadline for an initial submission, and a second deadline for the final submission. More students might submit the final version shortly after the second deadline, since they would have received a reward: I already completed that much of it .

• 3 You then need to clearly define what counts as an initial submission. Is a header file enough for a programming exercise? What if it doesn't compile? And if you do so, then you essentially turned the assignment into two assignments with separate deadlines. –  liori Commented Aug 6, 2015 at 23:20

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Getting Started with Canvas Assignments

• Last modification date Updated On July 26, 2024
• Categories: Assignments , Canvas , Uncategorized
• Categories: assessment , Getting Started , Grading

Canvas  Assignments  are a way for instructors to provide students opportunities to practice using the knowledge and skills they have gained or to assess student performance related to such knowledge and skills. (Creating an Assignment is the  only  way to create a new column in the Gradebook.)

In Canvas there are four basic  Submission Types  for assignments. The submission types include:

• No Submission : For assignments for which you are not collecting any content from the students.
• Text Entry : For students to enter text directly into a text box on Canvas.
• Website URL : For students to enter a URL (usually to a blog, video, podcast, etc.).
• Media Recordings : For students to upload or record media for submission.
• File Uploads : For students to upload files for submission ( Restrict Upload File Types  will allow you to limit which types of files may be submitted).
• On Paper : For assignments students will submit in person.
• External Tool : For assignments which students will submit through a third-party tool (such as Turnitin, Panopto Video Quiz, and PlayPosit).

Managing an Assignment

Managing assignment groups.

When getting started with Assignments, learn to

• Create an assignment shell with the Canvas guide  How do I create an assignment? 

If you select  Peer Reviews Appear Anonymously , annotation tools in  SpeedGrader  will become unavailable.

If you change the  Assign To  area from  Everyone  to select students after submissions have already begun, and do not have a second set of Assign To dates, submissions from unassigned students will disappear.

• Published assignments are visible as existing outside of availability dates, but students cannot see the details.
• If looking to update the due and/or availability dates on multiple assignments, see   How do I bulk update due dates and availability dates as an instructor?
• If choosing the option to make an assignment a  Group Assignment : If only assigning to specific groups, make sure to click the  X  on the  Everyone Else  choice under  Assign to .

Media Recording  Assignments are not recommended due to technical reasons. Instead, have students submit media by embedding it in a  Text Entry  assignment through Panopto .

Clearly express expectations and criteria for grading by using a  Rubric .

Be cautious limiting submission attempts, as students often make mistakes loading documents and need multiple attempts to ensure you have the correct submission.

• Delete an assignment with the Canvas guide  How do I delete an assignment?
• This duplication process will not work for Quizzes.
• Attach a rubric to an assignment for grading or to communicate expectations to students with the Canvas guide  How do I add a rubric to an assignment?

Accessibility Tips

• Use descriptive text for links, instead of long URLs or ‘click here’. 
• Make instructions brief and to-the-point. Avoid long paragraphs and sentences.
• Consider allowing multiple submission types to accommodate technical limitations students may face.

Assignment Groups  are a way to categorize different graded items in Canvas. For example, you may have journals, blogs, and essays which your students create in your course. Assignment Groups allow you to label and group different types of assignments separately in order to better organize and for ease when applying weighting (see  How do I weight the final course grade based on assignment groups? ). When getting started with Assignment Groups, learn to

• Add and delete assignment groups with the Canvas guide  How do I add an assignment group in a course?
• Move or reorder an assignment group with the Canvas guide  How do I move or reorder an assignment group?
• Make rules governing grading expectations within assignment groups with the Canvas guide  How do I create rules for an assignment group?

Additional Resources

• CTI Resource: What is the Assignments Index Page?
• How do I bulk update due dates and availability dates as an instructor?
• How do I weight the final course grade based on assignment groups?
• Canvas Student Guide

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Homework Overview

For more information about the Homework tab on your course homepage, please see this page .

If you're having trouble with the homework, we're here to help! Check out the When You Get Stuck guide for suggestions and to learn more all the resources available to you.

On this page

What is the homework, description of homework types, the aops honor code, homework faqs.

Find the name of your class below for more information about the types of homework and other practice. You can find brief descriptions of each type below .

Textbook Readings

The textbook readings provide a brief introduction to the week's class topics. The assigned chapters or sections are listed on both the Overview and Homework tabs of your Course Homepage . Readings should be completed before that week's live class session, to help you get the most out of the class.

Handouts provide a brief introduction to the week's class topics. Handouts can be found on the Handouts tab of your Course Homepage and should be read before that week's live class session, to help you get the most out of the class.

Alcumus is our online learning system, and it is the main source of practice you'll have in this course. Alcumus monitors your progress and carefully selects problems, just for you, based on your performance on earlier problems. The course homepage will tell you what subjects are assigned each week. Alcumus feeds you problems, checks your answers, provides solutions, and then picks more problems.

If your course has Alcumus assignments, these are the problems we recommend starting with, before the Challenge or Writing Problems.

For more about Alcumus assignments, please see this page .

Short-Answer Challenge Problems

Short-answer problems are those for which you'll enter a "short" answer of some sort, such as a number, letter, or expression. These problems are graded instantly by the computer; you'll immediately know if your answer was correct. As their name suggests, these problems are meant to be challenging !

For more details on Short-Answer Challenge Problems, please see this page .

Writing Problems

Writing Problems will ask you to write complete solutions to the problems, not just a sentence or final answer. You will get feedback on both the style and content of your solutions to these writing problems. Writing problems are those that give you true practice as a mathematician, communicating all of your ideas.

For more about Writing Problems, please see this page .

For more information on what to do if you need a little more time for a writing problem, please see our Extensions page .

Python Writing Problems: What good is a programming course without some actual programming practice? For more information on the unique homework in our Python courses, please see this page .

Practice Tests

Contest-preparation courses for the AMC 10, AMC 12, and AIME each provide one practice test in the style of that exam. We strongly encourage students to take the exam under test conditions. If the test is available, students will find a link to the test problems as well as a space to enter their answers. If the test is not yet available, its release date will be indicated. Once answers are submitted, the students will immediately be shown their score. Answers to these practice tests may not be re-submitted.

There is a due date for the test answers to be entered on this page—students are asked not to discuss the content of the test until after that date, but answers can be submitted after that date.

Discussion Problems

Discussion Problems invite you to engage directly with your peers. Collaborating and communicating are vital skills for any mathematician. Discussion Problems are a place to bounce ideas off of other students and explore new mathematical concepts together. You may be asked to dive deeper into class concepts, experiment with mathematical constructions, trade proofs of a theorem, or challenge your peers by writing your own math problems.

A student must agree to the AoPS Honor Code before accessing the course homepage. This honor code outlines our major expectations of students throughout the course.

The Art of Problem Solving Honor Code is as follows:

• I will be respectful of all other AoPS users while in this class and on this site as stated in the AoPS Terms of Service .
• I will not misrepresent another person's words or ideas as my own.

More details about the Honor Code can be found here .

When and in what order should I work?

In general, our most successful students start by reading the textbook or handouts (when available) before class, then attending class or reviewing the transcript, and then finally attempting the homework. Within the homework, we recommend Alcumus first, then the Challenge Problems on the Homework tab, then the Writing Problems. You can find more details on the Working Through Class Material page.

Many classes also have a My Goals tab on the course homepage to help you keep track of and pace yourself with the the weekly assignments.

When is the homework due?

Homework is typically due 8 days after the class. The due date for a week's assignment will be displayed in the top-left gray box on the Homework tab of the course homepage . Writing Problems due dates are most strictly tied to those deadlines. You'll need to request an extension if you need more time to work on those problems. Short-Answer Challenge Problems can be solved at any point after they are available, and Alcumus assignments may be completed after the due date. However, we encourage you to keep up with the due dates as much as possible so that you do not fall behind the class!

How can I get help?

We're glad you've asked! The course message board is the best place to get help with any class material, whether you need some clarification about a topic, you have a question about a homework problem, or you'd like some help understanding a particular solution. Course staff, other AoPS administrators, and even your classmates are able to help answer you questions, make suggestions, or provide any other assistance you might need!

Check out our guide for When You Get Stuck , which outlines the other resources available as part of the course and recommendations for how to use them!

How do I keep track of my homework?

The information displayed at the top of Homework tab will help you keep track of all the assignments due each week and their due dates. We've also created a few other ways to help you keep track of how it's going, including the Report tab, the My Goals tab , and weekly class reminder emails with a summary of your progress. Check out the Tracking Your Progress page for more information.

We also offer Parent Tools for parents to help their students keep track of their progress.

What is my grade?

The data we put on the class homepage is there to communicate with you about what work is assigned and to help you complete that work. This page provides more information about the different ways you can track your progress in the class. At the end of any subject or computer science course, we should be able to provide a letter grade upon request. Visit our Grades and Documentation page for instructions on how to submit a request, as well as more details on our grading philosophy.

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Credit: August de Richelieu

Does homework still have value? A Johns Hopkins education expert weighs in

Joyce epstein, co-director of the center on school, family, and community partnerships, discusses why homework is essential, how to maximize its benefit to learners, and what the 'no-homework' approach gets wrong.

By Vicky Hallett

The necessity of homework has been a subject of debate since at least as far back as the 1890s, according to Joyce L. Epstein , co-director of the Center on School, Family, and Community Partnerships at Johns Hopkins University. "It's always been the case that parents, kids—and sometimes teachers, too—wonder if this is just busy work," Epstein says.

But after decades of researching how to improve schools, the professor in the Johns Hopkins School of Education remains certain that homework is essential—as long as the teachers have done their homework, too. The National Network of Partnership Schools , which she founded in 1995 to advise schools and districts on ways to improve comprehensive programs of family engagement, has developed hundreds of improved homework ideas through its Teachers Involve Parents in Schoolwork program. For an English class, a student might interview a parent on popular hairstyles from their youth and write about the differences between then and now. Or for science class, a family could identify forms of matter over the dinner table, labeling foods as liquids or solids. These innovative and interactive assignments not only reinforce concepts from the classroom but also foster creativity, spark discussions, and boost student motivation.

"We're not trying to eliminate homework procedures, but expand and enrich them," says Epstein, who is packing this research into a forthcoming book on the purposes and designs of homework. In the meantime, the Hub couldn't wait to ask her some questions:

What kind of homework training do teachers typically get?

Future teachers and administrators really have little formal training on how to design homework before they assign it. This means that most just repeat what their teachers did, or they follow textbook suggestions at the end of units. For example, future teachers are well prepared to teach reading and literacy skills at each grade level, and they continue to learn to improve their teaching of reading in ongoing in-service education. By contrast, most receive little or no training on the purposes and designs of homework in reading or other subjects. It is really important for future teachers to receive systematic training to understand that they have the power, opportunity, and obligation to design homework with a purpose.

Why do students need more interactive homework?

If homework assignments are always the same—10 math problems, six sentences with spelling words—homework can get boring and some kids just stop doing their assignments, especially in the middle and high school years. When we've asked teachers what's the best homework you've ever had or designed, invariably we hear examples of talking with a parent or grandparent or peer to share ideas. To be clear, parents should never be asked to "teach" seventh grade science or any other subject. Rather, teachers set up the homework assignments so that the student is in charge. It's always the student's homework. But a good activity can engage parents in a fun, collaborative way. Our data show that with "good" assignments, more kids finish their work, more kids interact with a family partner, and more parents say, "I learned what's happening in the curriculum." It all works around what the youngsters are learning.

Is family engagement really that important?

At Hopkins, I am part of the Center for Social Organization of Schools , a research center that studies how to improve many aspects of education to help all students do their best in school. One thing my colleagues and I realized was that we needed to look deeply into family and community engagement. There were so few references to this topic when we started that we had to build the field of study. When children go to school, their families "attend" with them whether a teacher can "see" the parents or not. So, family engagement is ever-present in the life of a school.

My daughter's elementary school doesn't assign homework until third grade. What's your take on "no homework" policies?

There are some parents, writers, and commentators who have argued against homework, especially for very young children. They suggest that children should have time to play after school. This, of course is true, but many kindergarten kids are excited to have homework like their older siblings. If they give homework, most teachers of young children make assignments very short—often following an informal rule of 10 minutes per grade level. "No homework" does not guarantee that all students will spend their free time in productive and imaginative play.

Some researchers and critics have consistently misinterpreted research findings. They have argued that homework should be assigned only at the high school level where data point to a strong connection of doing assignments with higher student achievement . However, as we discussed, some students stop doing homework. This leads, statistically, to results showing that doing homework or spending more minutes on homework is linked to higher student achievement. If slow or struggling students are not doing their assignments, they contribute to—or cause—this "result."

Teachers need to design homework that even struggling students want to do because it is interesting. Just about all students at any age level react positively to good assignments and will tell you so.

Did COVID change how schools and parents view homework?

Within 24 hours of the day school doors closed in March 2020, just about every school and district in the country figured out that teachers had to talk to and work with students' parents. This was not the same as homeschooling—teachers were still working hard to provide daily lessons. But if a child was learning at home in the living room, parents were more aware of what they were doing in school. One of the silver linings of COVID was that teachers reported that they gained a better understanding of their students' families. We collected wonderfully creative examples of activities from members of the National Network of Partnership Schools. I'm thinking of one art activity where every child talked with a parent about something that made their family unique. Then they drew their finding on a snowflake and returned it to share in class. In math, students talked with a parent about something the family liked so much that they could represent it 100 times. Conversations about schoolwork at home was the point.

How did you create so many homework activities via the Teachers Involve Parents in Schoolwork program?

We had several projects with educators to help them design interactive assignments, not just "do the next three examples on page 38." Teachers worked in teams to create TIPS activities, and then we turned their work into a standard TIPS format in math, reading/language arts, and science for grades K-8. Any teacher can use or adapt our prototypes to match their curricula.

Overall, we know that if future teachers and practicing educators were prepared to design homework assignments to meet specific purposes—including but not limited to interactive activities—more students would benefit from the important experience of doing their homework. And more parents would, indeed, be partners in education.

Posted in Voices+Opinion

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The Cult of Homework

America’s devotion to the practice stems in part from the fact that it’s what today’s parents and teachers grew up with themselves.

America has long had a fickle relationship with homework. A century or so ago, progressive reformers argued that it made kids unduly stressed , which later led in some cases to district-level bans on it for all grades under seventh. This anti-homework sentiment faded, though, amid mid-century fears that the U.S. was falling behind the Soviet Union (which led to more homework), only to resurface in the 1960s and ’70s, when a more open culture came to see homework as stifling play and creativity (which led to less). But this didn’t last either: In the ’80s, government researchers blamed America’s schools for its economic troubles and recommended ramping homework up once more.

The 21st century has so far been a homework-heavy era, with American teenagers now averaging about twice as much time spent on homework each day as their predecessors did in the 1990s . Even little kids are asked to bring school home with them. A 2015 study , for instance, found that kindergarteners, who researchers tend to agree shouldn’t have any take-home work, were spending about 25 minutes a night on it.

But not without pushback. As many children, not to mention their parents and teachers, are drained by their daily workload, some schools and districts are rethinking how homework should work—and some teachers are doing away with it entirely. They’re reviewing the research on homework (which, it should be noted, is contested) and concluding that it’s time to revisit the subject.

Read: My daughter’s homework is killing me

Hillsborough, California, an affluent suburb of San Francisco, is one district that has changed its ways. The district, which includes three elementary schools and a middle school, worked with teachers and convened panels of parents in order to come up with a homework policy that would allow students more unscheduled time to spend with their families or to play. In August 2017, it rolled out an updated policy, which emphasized that homework should be “meaningful” and banned due dates that fell on the day after a weekend or a break.

“The first year was a bit bumpy,” says Louann Carlomagno, the district’s superintendent. She says the adjustment was at times hard for the teachers, some of whom had been doing their job in a similar fashion for a quarter of a century. Parents’ expectations were also an issue. Carlomagno says they took some time to “realize that it was okay not to have an hour of homework for a second grader—that was new.”

Most of the way through year two, though, the policy appears to be working more smoothly. “The students do seem to be less stressed based on conversations I’ve had with parents,” Carlomagno says. It also helps that the students performed just as well on the state standardized test last year as they have in the past.

Earlier this year, the district of Somerville, Massachusetts, also rewrote its homework policy, reducing the amount of homework its elementary and middle schoolers may receive. In grades six through eight, for example, homework is capped at an hour a night and can only be assigned two to three nights a week.

Jack Schneider, an education professor at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell whose daughter attends school in Somerville, is generally pleased with the new policy. But, he says, it’s part of a bigger, worrisome pattern. “The origin for this was general parental dissatisfaction, which not surprisingly was coming from a particular demographic,” Schneider says. “Middle-class white parents tend to be more vocal about concerns about homework … They feel entitled enough to voice their opinions.”

Schneider is all for revisiting taken-for-granted practices like homework, but thinks districts need to take care to be inclusive in that process. “I hear approximately zero middle-class white parents talking about how homework done best in grades K through two actually strengthens the connection between home and school for young people and their families,” he says. Because many of these parents already feel connected to their school community, this benefit of homework can seem redundant. “They don’t need it,” Schneider says, “so they’re not advocating for it.”

That doesn’t mean, necessarily, that homework is more vital in low-income districts. In fact, there are different, but just as compelling, reasons it can be burdensome in these communities as well. Allison Wienhold, who teaches high-school Spanish in the small town of Dunkerton, Iowa, has phased out homework assignments over the past three years. Her thinking: Some of her students, she says, have little time for homework because they’re working 30 hours a week or responsible for looking after younger siblings.

As educators reduce or eliminate the homework they assign, it’s worth asking what amount and what kind of homework is best for students. It turns out that there’s some disagreement about this among researchers, who tend to fall in one of two camps.

In the first camp is Harris Cooper, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University. Cooper conducted a review of the existing research on homework in the mid-2000s , and found that, up to a point, the amount of homework students reported doing correlates with their performance on in-class tests. This correlation, the review found, was stronger for older students than for younger ones.

This conclusion is generally accepted among educators, in part because it’s compatible with “the 10-minute rule,” a rule of thumb popular among teachers suggesting that the proper amount of homework is approximately 10 minutes per night, per grade level—that is, 10 minutes a night for first graders, 20 minutes a night for second graders, and so on, up to two hours a night for high schoolers.

In Cooper’s eyes, homework isn’t overly burdensome for the typical American kid. He points to a 2014 Brookings Institution report that found “little evidence that the homework load has increased for the average student”; onerous amounts of homework, it determined, are indeed out there, but relatively rare. Moreover, the report noted that most parents think their children get the right amount of homework, and that parents who are worried about under-assigning outnumber those who are worried about over-assigning. Cooper says that those latter worries tend to come from a small number of communities with “concerns about being competitive for the most selective colleges and universities.”

According to Alfie Kohn, squarely in camp two, most of the conclusions listed in the previous three paragraphs are questionable. Kohn, the author of The Homework Myth: Why Our Kids Get Too Much of a Bad Thing , considers homework to be a “reliable extinguisher of curiosity,” and has several complaints with the evidence that Cooper and others cite in favor of it. Kohn notes, among other things, that Cooper’s 2006 meta-analysis doesn’t establish causation, and that its central correlation is based on children’s (potentially unreliable) self-reporting of how much time they spend doing homework. (Kohn’s prolific writing on the subject alleges numerous other methodological faults.)

In fact, other correlations make a compelling case that homework doesn’t help. Some countries whose students regularly outperform American kids on standardized tests, such as Japan and Denmark, send their kids home with less schoolwork , while students from some countries with higher homework loads than the U.S., such as Thailand and Greece, fare worse on tests. (Of course, international comparisons can be fraught because so many factors, in education systems and in societies at large, might shape students’ success.)

Kohn also takes issue with the way achievement is commonly assessed. “If all you want is to cram kids’ heads with facts for tomorrow’s tests that they’re going to forget by next week, yeah, if you give them more time and make them do the cramming at night, that could raise the scores,” he says. “But if you’re interested in kids who know how to think or enjoy learning, then homework isn’t merely ineffective, but counterproductive.”

His concern is, in a way, a philosophical one. “The practice of homework assumes that only academic growth matters, to the point that having kids work on that most of the school day isn’t enough,” Kohn says. What about homework’s effect on quality time spent with family? On long-term information retention? On critical-thinking skills? On social development? On success later in life? On happiness? The research is quiet on these questions.

Another problem is that research tends to focus on homework’s quantity rather than its quality, because the former is much easier to measure than the latter. While experts generally agree that the substance of an assignment matters greatly (and that a lot of homework is uninspiring busywork), there isn’t a catchall rule for what’s best—the answer is often specific to a certain curriculum or even an individual student.

Given that homework’s benefits are so narrowly defined (and even then, contested), it’s a bit surprising that assigning so much of it is often a classroom default, and that more isn’t done to make the homework that is assigned more enriching. A number of things are preserving this state of affairs—things that have little to do with whether homework helps students learn.

Jack Schneider, the Massachusetts parent and professor, thinks it’s important to consider the generational inertia of the practice. “The vast majority of parents of public-school students themselves are graduates of the public education system,” he says. “Therefore, their views of what is legitimate have been shaped already by the system that they would ostensibly be critiquing.” In other words, many parents’ own history with homework might lead them to expect the same for their children, and anything less is often taken as an indicator that a school or a teacher isn’t rigorous enough. (This dovetails with—and complicates—the finding that most parents think their children have the right amount of homework.)

Barbara Stengel, an education professor at Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College, brought up two developments in the educational system that might be keeping homework rote and unexciting. The first is the importance placed in the past few decades on standardized testing, which looms over many public-school classroom decisions and frequently discourages teachers from trying out more creative homework assignments. “They could do it, but they’re afraid to do it, because they’re getting pressure every day about test scores,” Stengel says.

Second, she notes that the profession of teaching, with its relatively low wages and lack of autonomy, struggles to attract and support some of the people who might reimagine homework, as well as other aspects of education. “Part of why we get less interesting homework is because some of the people who would really have pushed the limits of that are no longer in teaching,” she says.

“In general, we have no imagination when it comes to homework,” Stengel says. She wishes teachers had the time and resources to remake homework into something that actually engages students. “If we had kids reading—anything, the sports page, anything that they’re able to read—that’s the best single thing. If we had kids going to the zoo, if we had kids going to parks after school, if we had them doing all of those things, their test scores would improve. But they’re not. They’re going home and doing homework that is not expanding what they think about.”

“Exploratory” is one word Mike Simpson used when describing the types of homework he’d like his students to undertake. Simpson is the head of the Stone Independent School, a tiny private high school in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, that opened in 2017. “We were lucky to start a school a year and a half ago,” Simpson says, “so it’s been easy to say we aren’t going to assign worksheets, we aren’t going assign regurgitative problem sets.” For instance, a half-dozen students recently built a 25-foot trebuchet on campus.

Simpson says he thinks it’s a shame that the things students have to do at home are often the least fulfilling parts of schooling: “When our students can’t make the connection between the work they’re doing at 11 o’clock at night on a Tuesday to the way they want their lives to be, I think we begin to lose the plot.”

When I talked with other teachers who did homework makeovers in their classrooms, I heard few regrets. Brandy Young, a second-grade teacher in Joshua, Texas, stopped assigning take-home packets of worksheets three years ago, and instead started asking her students to do 20 minutes of pleasure reading a night. She says she’s pleased with the results, but she’s noticed something funny. “Some kids,” she says, “really do like homework.” She’s started putting out a bucket of it for students to draw from voluntarily—whether because they want an additional challenge or something to pass the time at home.

Chris Bronke, a high-school English teacher in the Chicago suburb of Downers Grove, told me something similar. This school year, he eliminated homework for his class of freshmen, and now mostly lets students study on their own or in small groups during class time. It’s usually up to them what they work on each day, and Bronke has been impressed by how they’ve managed their time.

In fact, some of them willingly spend time on assignments at home, whether because they’re particularly engaged, because they prefer to do some deeper thinking outside school, or because they needed to spend time in class that day preparing for, say, a biology test the following period. “They’re making meaningful decisions about their time that I don’t think education really ever gives students the experience, nor the practice, of doing,” Bronke said.

The typical prescription offered by those overwhelmed with homework is to assign less of it—to subtract. But perhaps a more useful approach, for many classrooms, would be to create homework only when teachers and students believe it’s actually needed to further the learning that takes place in class—to start with nothing, and add as necessary.

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