What's a deadline
Blog 2 - What's a deadline?
Its now the start of week 2 of term, so far I have seen 62 out of the 85 students which I have on my module. That’s actually not bad for this time of year. The students are finally getting over the shock of me revealing to them that in last years exam a student actually vomited on the exam paper after reading it because they thought it was so hard. (I actually consider this one of the greatest achievements of my career!!!!!!).
The thoughts of exams see so far off that there is plenty to think of before then. It is at this point that I unveil to the students their assignment for this year. I’ve taken the step of telling the students that they must examine a company from the FTSE 100, and this company must start with the same letter as their surname. This has no academic benefit but does stop me receiving 80 reports on Tesco that are all the same, aren’t those students so clever, always one step ahead, lecturers will never realise we all worked on it together. Apparently this was too much for some of them to comprehend and resulted in a queue of 10 students at my office door wanting clarification of what this actually entailed. After letting them cool down for a few days our discussion moved to deadlines. I have set a non-negotiable deadline, the last possible deadline that allows students to resit before the summer and thus still graduate with their classmates. This again apparently was just too much information, although very clearly saying that if you want an extension you cannot graduate until next year does make their ears prick up.
I’ve decided to try and get the students to consider their course, rather than just their modules, so to do this we map out all of their deadlines on the various modules so that they can see that if they plan their time correctly that they can be only working on one assignment at a time throughout the year. However, this does force them to consider the unthinkable, HAND IN AN ASSIGNMENT BEFORE THE DEADLINE.
It leads me to ask students a question, what is a deadline? The common response is, ‘the day you hand in your work’. Imagine their surprise when I inform them that this is the last day that they can hand in their work, not the only day that they can hand it in. To all students, plan your time, figure out what you will work on and when, use a Gantt chart to set your targets, and CONSIDER DOING SOME WORK BEFORE YOU HAVE TO!!!!!
