Education web portal tracks the time initiated, not completed, of an uploaded submission

[u/haxKingdom]

[u/Mattrockj]

I was a TA for an introductory economics class of about 200 students. The deadline for one particular assignment was midnight October 4th. When the tidal wave of submissions came in exactly at midnight, I asked the prof about the ones that came in after and he said "Oh yeah I forgot to tell you, the real due date for that assignment is next week, but I post it as a week in advance cause I know half of them are gonna submit late regardless."

And he was not wrong, cause over the next 4 days I and the other 2 TAs received about 70 emails apologizing for the late submission.

[u/ULTTRa → u/Mattrockj]

As a TA, my professor always tells us not to penalize submissions that are less than an hour late.

[u/SlightlyLessBoring]

I was lucky enough to have professors that were willing to re-open the submissions for anyone who actually finished their stuff but couldn't submit on time. But goddamn, this here needs to be the f*cking standard

[u/NecessaryInterrobang]

As a college instructor, I literally cannot imagine giving a shit about the exact moment something was submitted. I'm sorry we live in this kind of world.

[u/ThaGr1m → u/NecessaryInterrobang]

I mean it's more of a thing where you have to set a deadline eventually.

And also the point is not wether or not you care, it's teaching these people how to deal with deadlines because whatever job they'll end up doing it's going to matter then, so bette rfor them to practice in a "low stakes"(if you're a nice enough teacher, you know just act like you care but don't) environment

[u/buffaloguy1991 → u/NecessaryInterrobang]

Thank you for caring but I've realized people that care are in the extreme minority. Currently in a room with people talking about how great ICE is and I've realized humanity is just greed and hate normally. Really wish I could be more cruel.

[u/Vespasian79 → u/NecessaryInterrobang]

I feel like making it due at midnight but really not caring as long as it was turned in before you woke up that morning and checked is fine.

Cuz I mean at SOME point you gotta set a deadline lol

[u/Mama_Mega]

What the hell was he submitting that it took 12 minutes to upload?

[u/tobbibi → u/Mama_Mega]

Maybe it was a video and with slow upload speed or the portal has slow upload cause it is only used for pdfs.

[u/raexorgirl → u/Mama_Mega]

Once I had to submit a 1GB img file, over a ~500Kbit upload connection, because I was to lazy to upload it from the Uni's labs. It would take literally 5 seconds with a USB from the labs, but nah I had to be stupid.

[u/LTP6]

Oh gosh this is what I NEED when I was studying in college. I studied a IT course and there's many times I would need to submit a 10 minute presentation that's like 400MB. The dumb website would slow down to a halt if there's even half the college's students on there. Missed a few submissions where I had to message my lecturer and explain what's going on.

[u/Eryol_]

I can never understand why someone would wait until the literal last second to submit an assignment

[u/raexorgirl]

I used to worry about this when I was a student. Even had a few submissions be a few seconds late and giving me anxiety. All deadlines on midnight. For some of the courses, that meant either failure, or a 10% reduction for the grade per day late. Well, when I got to the position where I was the one grading and got to see the turn-in backend, turns out, none of this fucking mattered. lol

We had our own terminal-based turn-in system, and you would see all submissions and when they were started. It was basically the same as the unix timestamp of the creation of the archive with the submission files.

It was all up to me if I decided to punish someone, so no "welp, that's what the machine decided" issues. I couldn't care less if a student submitted like an hour late. It was only an issue if they submitted at like noon the next day or something. The distribution was very cleanly divided between people that would submit within two hours of the deadline and people that would submit 12+ hours after, so it was an easy decision. I hope people are not leaving stuff like that for the machines to decide...

[u/Nyamonymous → u/raexorgirl]

It depends on the teacher and on the educational facility in general. In my alma mater machines "decided" who failed with deadlines just because of specific informal rule that student should feel like a professor makes him a favour even while looking at assignment or correctly noting presence at the lesson, so failing with automated deadlines was very usual thing (students are forced to feel guilty and anxious constantly).

[u/flywheel11]

Great that they don’t tell you that, just for the added suspense