“I turned in my paper last week, but sent it to the wrong email address.”

Could have been true, but when I pointed out the “bounce-back” feature for misdeliveries she got all humble and admitted that she had lied. That became a more serious offense than the late paper.

“The guy working next to me in the computer lab accidentally kicked the power cord for my computer out of its socket, and after I rebooted it the paper I had been working on had disappeared.”

When asked, she told me with a straight face that she hadn’t saved the file once during her supposed four-hour editing session. As with many of the above excuses, given what I knew of this student it sounded entirely plausible.

I would prefer not to make a student go through the trouble of getting a note from the funeral home when her father dies.

My position is that if you think you had a good enough reason to miss a deadline, then it’s not my place to question it. One student’s broken leg is as good as another’s emergency walk in the park. The penalty for a late paper is not getting it back in a timely fashion (which might easily hurt your grade in other ways).

Worrying about students who might be breaking the rules is just unfair to those who are following them. The professor’s time is for those that are there to learn. Those that aren’t are already hurting themselves.

I have no problem excusing an absence for a car accident, and will bend over backwards to help that student catch up if practicable.

The problem is this: “I had the accident, so I only attended your class one time, and did no work, but now that it’s the end of the semester can’t you give me an A?”

No, but I can refer you to helpful administrators who will clear your transcript and refund your money and allow you to re-enroll with no penalties.

“It is unfair and unreasonable to expect me to attend a class on a Thursday morning because I am in the rugby team, which plays on Wednesdays, and I am morally obliged to get drunk with the rest of the team after the match.”

Chris, the wording of this one makes me strongly suspect that one of your colleagues put them up to it. Since this is a public forum I won’t name any likely names…

But after instituting a policy of one 24 hour extension per semester when a student wants it, no penalty no questions asked, I’ve never got a late excuse again.

“Actually, I’m 19. Never really lived on my own before and I’m just learning about life as an adult – and by that, I mean life besides working a treadmill like we will all be doing for the rest of our lives gradually succumbing to depression, joylessness, mid-life crisis and weeping over our many regrets in a care home like my parents, grandparents and great-grandparents. I appreciate learning and education and don’t wish to disrespect this institution or you, but I postponed writing that particular assignment in favour of spontaneity, joy, the company of people I care for and new experiences in years that I will never get back again in the hope that I will retain enough happiness to get me through the soul-crushing, alienating working life in the poorly-thought out civilisation humanity has created for itself to endure. Thanks.”

“aliens landed in our back yard and took my homework as an artifact of our civilization.”

i gave him an extra day to turn it in for the creativity of the excuse.

Learners sometimes use applications that are not available in school (e.g. MS Works) and save them in proprietary file formats that can’t be read in school. Or they have a later version of MS Word than the school and don’t save in a backward compatible format. Most teachers don’t know about readers and translators (nor should they need to) and many of these files end up in my inbox to sort out.

Perhaps the various XML file formats might sort this out in the future but with the lag in software acquisition by both institutions and individuals I’m not holding my breath. As I sit here editing this piece in the ‘Blogger’ editor my thoughts turn to Learning Platforms to provide a solution. An LP worthy of that title will provide an editor with more formatting capability than most teachers would wish to see in a piece of written work and the option to ‘lock’ a final delivery edit at a defined time. Learners can use the editor to create their work or paste in the text from their word processor of choice.

If work is to be delivered digitally surely standardising around the server platform must offer the best chance of consistency and elimination of ‘corrupt file syndrome’?

I don’t know how it is now, but back in the day, we at AITS prided ourselves on going the extra mile to provide good, professional service. If somebody ran in out of breath with a story about a file that needed to be converted in the next five minutes so that they get to class on time, we would be on it, with no thought about motivations(after all, we were mostly students too.) The key is in rushing the workers, of course.

As to submissions: our IT department as gone through three different changes in the email system in less than a year, with an extra one for our department alone. I’ve had people I didn’t believe swear up and down that they sent me email, only to find out later it got bounced to a supposedly dead address. IT people, keep your platforms stable and consistent.

Finally, way back in the day when computers were first being introduced to the university, I had a guy who came in that wanted to convert his WordStar file into WordPerfect. I could see a file on his (5 1/4”) disk using (DOS) utilities, and I tried to convert it. What I got was hash with no backup, and he made my supervisor write him a note to his instructor excusing him. What I also got was a dressing-down and a note in my employee file. Come to find out a week or so later (I kept the ‘bad’ disk), there was no original WordStar document. What I had gotten was just hash with various prefs tweaked so that it was copied to a hidden file. The followup was an apology from my boss, and tracking down the student’s professor, who verified he had a history of turning in things late because tech issues.

So that’s another trick: finagling an innocent third party into corrupting your ‘project’ and getting an accepted authority to write your excuse for you.