Late Assignment: Professor's Strict Policy Lesson! #deadline #productivity #leadership #teacherlife

I was teaching career readiness at Purdue. And the class had an assignment that they had to interview an alum and then write it up. And then they had to submit it by 12 o'clock on Thursday, on a Thursday. It was worth 100 points. It was a lot of points for the course. I mean, like, you miss this and you're going to drop a letter grade. And this is like the one credit, easy A, basically attendance, do the work, you get the A, right? No, no grading on quality at all. Okay, so I, I got there on Thursday and then everybody turned in that night. The following Thursday, two of the women in my class who are star students sat up front. It was 60— no, 90 people in that class. They sat up front And they were always there, ask a lot of questions, star students came up to me and they said, "Professor Mosher, we tried to submit our report. It was like 12:05 on Thursday night and the portal was closed, so we didn't know why. So we're just letting you know that we'd like to turn it in." I was like, "No." And they're like, "What do you mean no?" Well, 12:05 means it actually was Friday. The syllabus says if you turn it in late, you can get half credit if you inform the instructor 24 hours. This is a week later. You lost all the points for this thing. And I could just see, you know, these two A students, like 3.8 GPAs. Looking at a 1-credit B, their faces were just like, I hate you. You know, this wasn't about like policy or syllabus. This is like, I did this to them. Right. And I was like, so I said a story within the story. I said, look, I was on a proposal once and we were putting this together and we easily spent $100,000 of resources to put this proposal together. Customer portal closed at 12 o'clock midnight and we didn't turn it in and we were ready to go at 12:15. And I'll just share this with you, probably some partner was going like, the font size is wrong, we have flicker on the PowerPoint. So we had to fix that and then we turned it in, it tried to turn 12:15, the portal was closed. And we called up the guy, the customer, the next day and they literally said, this is an indicator of how you do the work.