The first "good idea at the time" dealt with deadline extensions.

The scenario in question was presented by my long time friend Lauren Bricker of the University of Washington although a very similar situation was also presented by of Kristin Stephens-Martinez of Duke. Lauren was one of the few High School teachers with a strong background in CS so she's really a unicorn and it made sense for UW to come calling and snatch her up.

The issue was students turning in projects late. This is a tale as old as time. Deadlines are a hot button issue in education. Some think that we need hard ones and others think you should be able to turn anything in at any time. I fall somewhere in between.

In Lauren's case far too many students were asking for extensions. This was a problem. The first solution was to allow any student to request a 2 week extension on any in term project. You couldn't ask for an extension on the final project. With the extension, a student could resubmit one time.

This worked well with some students - students who had something going on during the project run or otherwise had legitimate issues that made the original project window unrealistic.

The problem was that too many students would use the policy to basically not do anything until the last minute - essentially treat the project as a project with a deadline two weeks further out.

So, this policy worked for the student who tried to do things the right way but would end up with others getting jammed up and falling further and further behind as the class moved on.

One suggested solution would be to require specific milestones be submitted but this would likely be a hardship on the students who legitimately needed the extra time.

My suggestion was as follows.

I noticed that Lauren uses git with her classes. Git has a wonderful feature - extensive logs. As long as a student commits and pushes their work to whatever central repository system they use - GitLab, GitHub or other, the instructor can easily see what was done when.

My policy has always been that as long as you've been doing some level of legitimate work on a project I'll give an extension. When I do grant an extension I always start by asking the student - when do you think is a reasonable due date and I also ask about any resources they need. As long as the their suggestion is reasonable I go with it. If it isn't, we discuss why it isn't and come up with something together.

What do I mean by legitimate work? Well, that depends but at a very basic level, I look to see if there was some development of the project, some code, working or failed or even documentation in the readme about a student's issues (we set that policy of using the readme as such early in the semester).

If a student asks for an extension but didn't commit/push anything, we have a discussion. I may or may not grant the extension but you can bet the next time they do it right.

The nice thing about this solution is that aspects can also be automated. It's easy enough to write a script to determine how many, if any commits a student has pushed in a given time frame. It would be equaly easy to write a script to email students or instructors if a student wasn't submitting anything within a certain time frame.

For my policy, beyond this, I just request that the student asks for the extension prior to right before an assignment is due. Some teachers disagree and feel that requiring a student ask is more than what should be expected but I do think that there is a point where a student has to advocate for themselves and I'll usually accept the first last minute request but then not future ones.

So, that's how I've been dealing with late projects and it's worked well for me and my classes. I hope it can be helpful to some of you out there but if you've got another policy or method of trying to get students to work on their projects in a timely manner please share.