Just curious: how many students are there in this class?

[150]

"Papers not submitted when Brad DeLong starts talking will be graded down by half.".....

Good Lord, man! Get over yourself. Are you subject to any deadlines that are specific to the minute and result in so massive a penalty for tardiness? I've never met a professor who consistently graded and returned papers on anything other than a "sometime next week" basis. Even in the business world, project deadlines are routinely set with a degree of flexibility measured in days or weeks.

If a student turns in a paper at the end of class, later in the evening or, horror of horrors, the next day, the sky is not going to fall, and he/she is not exhibiting any unusually large degree of irresponsibility. Nit-picking by the minute like this is nothing more than sheer professorial hubris.

Here's a tip for you and all your colleagues: Your time, and your wisdom, are not so uniquely valuable that you are entitled to behave like little Napoleon-wannabes. You are performing a service, paid for by the students, and nothing more. So lighten up, dump the ego and try treating your students with the respect they deserve as adults and soon-to-be professionals.

I would grade down Dave's paper automatically for insolence.

"If a student turns in a paper at the end of class, later in the evening or, horror of horrors, the next day, the sky is not going to fall, and he/she is not exhibiting any unusually large degree of irresponsibility."

The deadline is TWELVE DAYS from now. If they can't come up with 800 words in twelve days (including two weekends), then that should indeed be considered "[an] unusually large degree of irresponsibility".

(But then, I would also knock off a grade for spelling "mercantilism" wrong, so YMMV.)

Well...ah hem...The "Amurican" revolution, I b'lieve, Professor DeLong, was largely a revolt of the middle classes.

May we summarize the readings in the form of a madrigal?

In 4-1/2 years of college, I only turned a paper in on time once. It was in Herschel Baker's course on 17th century poetry. He stated simply that late papers would not be accepted, and it was clear that he meant it.

I often wished that everyone else had laid down such a stringent rule.

I think Brad is doing his students a favor. It's not about him.

Hugh Gordon is right. As even the initial poster tacitly acknowledges, there have to be *some* deadlines or stuff never gets turned in. And deadlines are meaningless without penalties and without clarity. So it reduces logically to a question of precisely when the deadline should be, and exactly what the penalty should be for not meeting it. (Any imprecision will be instantly taken advantage of by students, and you will waste time in haggling.)

E.g. if you let people turn the essay in at any point during class, you get folks running in half way through class, or five minutes before the end of class, having stayed at their computers in the hope that an extra half-hour of massaging the text will produce a higher grade.

Think of it like an exam (which is what this assignment really is): One of the main functions of an exam is to punctuate the course, to (try and) bring everyone to a roughly-similar point of thought and reflection and mastery of material at the same time. This is why you don't let people postpone taking midterms. And this is what makes the situation very different from a project deadline.

Moreover, especially with essays, it's much more efficient to grade them all at once than to grade in dribs and drabs. Getting them all promptly also aids quick turnaround.

Geez, expecting standards of a UC Berkeley student? Most of them would be aghast if they didn't have such rigorous deadlines. I know, I was a berkeley student and I *liked* professors who actually expected me to perform.

And a lot of us also hated 98%.

But then I guess when you have a president that encourages mediocrity, it's hard to keep those ideals up, when you're not rewarded for it in the bidness world.

Jeez Professor Delong. You can forget about ever teaching at Stanford.

(Although I graduated fifteen years ago, there's still an incomplete or two I'll get to someday.)

Great questions, but will these papers be posted for all to read, or are your non-student fans merely going to be teased?

Thlayli wrote: "The deadline is TWELVE DAYS from now. If they can't come up with 800 words in twelve days (including two weekends), then that should indeed be considered '[an] unusually large degree of irresponsibility'."

I would agree that for such a small assignment, any significant tardiness would be indefensible, but setting an absolute deadline down to the very minute? Sorry, but that's just pointless.

Colin wrote: "One of the main functions of an exam is to punctuate the course, to (try and) bring everyone to a roughly-similar point of thought and reflection and mastery of material at the same time. This is why you don't let people postpone taking midterms. And this is what makes the situation very different from a project deadline."

So, if someone turns the paper in at 12:00pm on the due date, and someone else misses the bus that morning and turns it in at 12:35pm, they aren't demonstrating "reflection and mastery of [the] material at the same time"? Again, that degree of specificity is pointless. Also, the midterm analogy is flawed. We don't allow students to postpone their midterm because doing so would require that an entirely new test be created to ensure they wouldn't have advance knowledge of the questions.

Colin Wrote: "(Any imprecision will be instantly taken advantage of by students, and you will waste time in haggling.)"

Yes there are some people who habitually turn everything in at the last possible moment, but they do not represent the majority. That said, I do recognize the need to have tangible penalties to spur these students to action and, frankly, to reward their more diligent peers by comparison. I think that can be done with a reasonable sliding-scale of penalties for tardiness. Plus or minus a day is acceptable, and beyond that a penalty of one letter grade per extra day, for instance.

My point is not that deadlines are irrelevant or that they should be entirely unenforced. I'm simply saying that hyper-specific deadlines and excessive penalties for missing them are not justified. They do not reflect the real world outside of academia, and they do not offer any substantial educational or even logistical benefits. In my opinion, they are nothing more than a long-standing tradition that arises from professor's inflated opinions of themselves and their dictatorial condescension towards students.

It's actually very similar to the practice of forcing med students and interns to work 36-hour shifts in the hospital when they first start. The old guard tries to defend it with a few barely plausible justifications, but it really just comes down to arrogance, a dismissive attitude toward the interns, and a "right of passage" tradition akin to hazing.

Anyway, I just think it's pointless and arbitrary, and reflects poorly on the professorial culture.

"My point is not that deadlines are irrelevant or that they should be entirely unenforced. I'm simply saying that hyper-specific deadlines and excessive penalties for missing them are not justified. They do not reflect the real world outside of academia, and they do not offer any substantial educational or even logistical benefits"

Try filing your income taxes one day late, and see what happens.

Income taxes not a problem. File an extension, about 2 minutes work.

Deadlines exist for the benefit of the professor and the class as a whole - they provide for efficient grading and moving forward with the course.

Without some kind of penalty for missing a deadline, the student loses a valuable lesson - not that the real world won't let them slide by occasionally, but that their behavior has a large impact on the group's objective of learning.

In a economics class, knowing that individual behavior has an impact on group dynamics is not a trivial piece of knowledge.

If you consistently fail to meet deadlines in a class, you should seriously consider dropping it, unless the professor lets you get away with it.

So, back to the economic causes of the American Revolution: Considering that Britain of 1776 was not by any modern standard a representative democracy (going rate for a seat in parliament, ca. 1790: £500 to finish out an existing term, or 5000 guineas to own the seat in perpetuity), can anyone tell me what exactly the "No Taxation Without Representation" people were really asking for?

I don't buy the argument that turning a paper in slightly late has a noticable impact on the class as a whole. If the bulk of the papers come in on the first day and the remainder trickle in over the next couple of days, there's pretty much zero impact on the grading process.

As for teaching students a lesson, again I would argue that it is a lesson which does not reflect reality outside of the classroom. Moreover, even if you believe that responsibility/punctuality is one of the lessons students need to be taught, does that particular lesson really account for 50% of the knowledge/enlightenment the prof is trying to impart? If a student does all the reading and writes an excellent, insightful paper but turns it in a day late, has he really lost 50% of the value from taking the course? If so, that's a pretty lousy course.

Honestly, all these arguments extolling the virtues of hyper-specific deadlines and draconian penalties for tardiness amount to little more than post hoc rationalizations for a practice everyone has been conditioned to accept as normal. The simple truth is that this is the way it's always been done so everyone casts about for reasons why it might make sense. Well, it doesn't. There's no logical reason for it. It's all about the professor-student power relationship and a "hey I went through it, so you have to too" type of academic hazing.

David Moles wrote: "So, back to the economic causes of the American Revolution"

Agreed. I don't want to be a troll here. I just always wanted to pop-off to a professor about deadlines, and this seemed like a good opportunity. I now return you to your regularly-scheduled scholarly discussion. :)

David Moles wrote at 10:36 AM:
"... can anyone tell me what exactly the "No Taxation Without Representation" people were really asking for?"

They wanted to right to establish their own “rotten buroughs”, of course, along with seats in Parliament. Just like a corporation which is resisting seating directors on the board, the British Parliament resisted, much to their sorrow. The fact that the American franchise was originally tied to property ownership demonstrates that the American founders held similar attitudes as their home country counterparts. Since most of the American colonies had been established as business enterprises, it is not surprising that the American founders held opinions not much different than that of a corporation director or manager.

Gee Dave, I got through 4 years of college and didn't miss any of my deadlines. And one of my assignments was to write a freaking novel. I have noooooooooo sympathy.

I assume the professor would make exceptions for people whose papers are kidnapped by terrorists, or other such mitigating factors.

Dave:

Just curious, have you ever taught a class? Tardiness can be pretty disruptive. Both the teacher and the students get distracted if a steady trickle of people are coming in, unzipping their coats/backpacks, etc. during the first 5-10 minutes. If it's bad enough this can make the first chunk of class useless...

As someone pointed out above, if you allow the essay to be turned in at any point during class, you've virtually guaranteed that someone will show up halfway through because they wanted that extra 20 minutes to work on the essay.

I can think of at least some professionals who have inflexible writing deadlines: journalists. If they sent in their copy a day late, I think there might be a problem...

"Income taxes not a problem. File an extension, about 2 minutes work."
Great, as long as you file the extension on time.

"Great, as long as you file the extension on time."

And pay the estimated tax with the extension form.

"Britain of 1776 was not by any modern standard a representative democracy (going rate for a seat in parliament, ca. 1790: £500"

Whereas to run for US President today you virtually have to be a billionaire - governmental forms often change more than realities.

One downplayed reason for the American Revolution was that George III tried to stop colonists moving into the Ohio valley. Not a major factor for the wealthy leaders (who wrote the histories) but the soldiers were drawn disproportionately from frontiersmen.

You can claim this as nice King George trying to protect the Indians or as a distant government deserving to be removed because it was preventing efficient economic activity - both are true.

"And pay the estimated tax with the extension form."

Right, though failure-to-pay is penalized at a much lower rate than failure-to-file, just like if I bullshitted my way through that paper I might be able to get a C+, but if I finish it two days late, I get an F.

Prof DeLong apparently deleted my comment, so let's try it again:
Making the deadline occur when the prof opens his mouth is offensive because it smacks of claiming divine power (I speak and the universe obeys.) It also sets up a humiliating situation for the student who arrives 30 seconds late. You can get the same result without the theatrics by requiring the paper to be in a mailbox by 5 pm on a date certain.

Someone deleted my comment as well on the causes of the American Revolution, so here they are again:

1. Not wanting to pay for our own defense while claiming rights no one in England had yet.

2. England had promised America west of the Appalachians to the natives, clearly a non-starter for the genocide that eventually happened.

3. Slavery ended in England in 1773 and was clearly on the way out in the rest of the possessions.

Not to mention the Royal Navy kicking the hell out of John Hancock's smuggling business. All the red white and blue junk is just that - junk history.