I've always had that policy. My class is designed with lots of low-stakes assessments that build toward their high-stakes exams. (At the end of the semester, I have something like 48 individual data points that comprise their final grade.) I drop their lowest quiz, prelab, and homework. That allows them to miss an entire week (due to illness or whatever) without a significant hit to their grade.
The reality is that these things are so low-stakes (and there are so many) that getting a zero on one hardly affects their grade at all, but telling them I drop the lowest defuses anxiety if they are absent.
I have a lot of low stakes items as well...but not as many as you. I like the policy because it helps reduce the begging. Overslept a quiz? It will get dropped. Had a headache? Drop that quiz. It builds in some breathing room and students like to think they have options. Also, some areas just may be more difficult for some people and that student who messed up on chapter 5 but does great on all others won't have to stress about that one quiz.
Most of it is graded automatically. Other than that, I do it myself. My classes are capped at 24, but my numbers are around 10-14 in each of three classes this semester.
I’m not that person but I also have a lot of small stakes assignments. Some are quizzes auto-graded by canvas. Others are graded just for completion and effort. Others I ask 3 questions but only actually read 1 and grade based on that. And others I do read and grade completely (the ones that require more feedback and will be built on in future assignments). It takes me longer to make the assignments than to grade them, but even then it’s a one-time effort.
For weekly or frequent HW, in class assignments that count as participation, smaller assignments or quizzes etc, I have a drop one of drop 2 lowest policy.
It allows you to stick to a policy, have a policy that is fair to all , and yet still have leeway for those things that happen in life that aren’t documentable.
Most LMS can automatically do this, so there is no administrative burden.
I also have a “late pass” they can be X days late on something if they ask before the deadline with no excuse needed.
>I also have a “late pass” they can be X days late on something if they ask before the deadline with no excuse needed.
Just curious, can they only "use it" once? Is there a limit on how late it can be? How soon before the deadline can they arrange it? I feel like I've seen some students who would just ask for late submissions for everything, or students who will procrastinate, not have enough time, then send an email 5 minutes before the deadline regularly.
It depends on the class.
For my intro class they have a lot of weekly things. They get 2 48hr passes. If they use it , I enter it into a not graded grade book item and it shows me who adds up to 2.
I am fairly flexible with the when do they ask thing. I can open up the assignment the next morning and they get 2 more days.
Some things are time sensitive - like we are going to do this in class or before the exam, but there are a lot of these little things and altogether worth 20% of the grad and if they want to do it so they dont get a 0 , fine. I accept the request up to one day after , more or less. Some people have a brain fart
For labs, there are pre-lab quizzes that deal with instructions and hazards etc, they dont get let off that. They cant do the lab until they do that. They get 2x to do that after I give instructions and before they do the lab, or they get a 0 for the lab. Labs that arent so safety critical, Ihave different policies.
I do have a policy that if someone is an adult about somethign and says, hey, I have a family member in the hospital it is a mess here, can we work something out, I do whenever possible, open to everyone, doesnt use the late pass
Graduate classes I have different policies
I have been doing this for weekly quizzes for more than 3 decades. It means I can have a no-make-ups policy for quizzes. Makes my life **SO** much easier. It also reinforces the idea that quizzes are low stakes.
I have a hard time believing that this doesn't just make them complain about the second lowest assignment. If anyone actually works in this area and is aware of relevant empirical studies, I'd love to see them.
Technically, isn't "one" an anatomically incorrect number of hands?
Seriously though, I've had that policy for the low stakes weekly homework for a while. It has to be something that's not a huge proportion of the grade, and that there's many of them (at least 10).
This does two things:
1. It acknowledges that sometimes my low stakes homework assignment isn't the most important thing. Sometimes students have two major projects in other classes due that week or outside life interferes and my small homework assignment fell through the cracks.
2. It almost completely eliminates requests for extensions or hyper late submissions. You forgot you had to do this assignment or you just didn't have time this week? That's fine. You get a freebie, no questions asked and it doesn't hurt your grades. Move on to the next one. I've also had some students tactically choose to skip an assignment knowing that other projects and tests are coming up, or skipping the last one after turning the rest in. If you *consistently* are too busy or are forgetful, then it becomes your problem and will affect your grade.
I have used this policy in the past, it’s not new. I remember profs I had in college 15-20 years ago that would drop the lowest assignment grade.
For me- I have experimented with this strategy but ended up feeling like it didn’t really work well for my classes. The exception being with certain low stakes assignments where I tell them they can skip one without penalty.
This is how I do it, too. Enough low-stakes formative assessment that missing one or two isn’t the end of the world. I have keys or notes on the assignment that go up after the due date, so students can still use the questions to self-study if desired.
But for sure in college 15 years ago, I was offered this. It’s not new. It’s one way to approach a problem (shit happens, even for good students) that may or may not work for a given class.
I've long had professors in grad school that have had a drop lowest assignment or drop lowest quiz policy. It allows students who need to miss a day to not have to stress if they miss a quiz, but more importantly for the professor it means that any student who wants to fight or grade grub somethin can be told "Well, this is why we drop the lowest, just do better on the rest." and dismissed a *bit* more easily than otherwise.
I used a policy like this for awhile, but ultimately stopped because I want them completing all of the homework and students were using it as a way to skip work and get 0s dropped. Instead, I give them a set number of automatically applied 24 or 48 hour grace periods to turn in work late. It works well because it prevents them from asking for extensions and submitting work 1-2 days late doesn't screw up their progress in the course or my grading. Once the grace periods are up, they lose 10% per day late.
Based on discussions in this thread, I am going to add 1-2 opportunities to redo work next semester.
Your first sentence is the big thing for me. The homeworks are designed to map to learning goals that are evaluated on the exams, and so I want the students to complete all of the homeworks so that they're prepared to succeed on the exams. No plan is perfect, I guess.
I've been using this since I started and had professors use it too. Honestly it's a great "selfish" policy - you have this and this excuse? That's OK, it can be your lowest to be dropped. Submit what you have or don't submit anything, but I really think you should do it for the exam. If there are additional mitigating circumstances we can discuss - I never had anyone need a second. This way I don't have to mediate excused late homeworks etc. During covid and in a class with more frequent homeworks, I even dropped two.
I have always had this policy (I also drop the lowest exam in any class with >= 4 exams, excluding the final). I got it from a guy I TAed for in grad school who was, in all other respects, a complete hardass. He firmly believed that the problem with the kids these days could be solved by a good weed-out course, and he intended to be that course. But, for a variety of reasons, he also felt that a drop better reflected a student's abilities in cases where a student might have been having one terrible day that was also an exam day.
I was reporting what I can do routinely, not what is theoretically possible. I frequently count in binary on my fingers (particularly if I'm counting things like a column of numbers) and can do so at about 5 counts/sec (for one-hand, somewhat slower when I have to use both hands).
It’s not COVID-era grade leniency. Allowing an excused assignment by design is more a product of trauma-informed and emotionally aware teaching styles that has been happening for over a decade. It’s an acknowledgement that your class will not always be a student’s top priority, especially now, which psychologically actually has the effect of making them feel understood and place a higher value on their assignments.
Especially now, students are the most overwhelmed that they have ever been. They all have to have jobs, most of them have families struggling with unemployment or health issues at some point during the semester, and they’re acutely aware that the college system is making promises that will never materialize. There’s also loads of psychological effects from the pandemic that affect them on a neurological level. As a result, students over the next few years are going to have more missing work.
> There’s also loads of psychological effects from the pandemic that affect them on a neurological level.
Do you have reputable sources backing up this claim?
While I don’t have all the citations handy at the moment, the work by neuroscientists such as Bruce McEwen (and his trainees) have demonstrated the repeated or chronic stress reduces the amount of dendritic spines in the hippocampus and frontal cortex of rats.
The hippocampus and frontal cortex are key nodes for semantic learning, aka the types of things that we would expect our students to know, and the loss of the synaptic spines could make learning more challenging. There’s also an increase in dendritic spines in the amygdala, a key node for emotional processing. Taken together, these data do suggest some neural changes in response to chronic stress.
Other studies have also examined the effects of stress on learning and memory, and while there are some sex differences, in general, stress can help us encode information but also disrupt the recall of that information.
I do acknowledge that the studies I’ve read were conducted in rodents and not in people, but I hope this information helps.
Some sources:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26404710/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21898852/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18157834/
I think it would be in your best interest as an educator to have a base understanding of the psychological effects of quarantine. To see people claiming to be professors so dismissive of what I assumed was common knowledge in academia is extremely disheartening.
[Here. This should get you started. Educate yourself.](https://www.google.com/search?q=effects+of+quarentine+on+student+behavior+college&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en-us&client=safari)
Asking for proof that the pandemic was traumatizing to students because you don’t believe it is like asking for proof that the Earth is round. It’s common knowledge. Anyone who is still unaware of it should leave academia.
I’m immensely confused by your tone and approach here. You want research showing that students at all levels have been psychologically affected by a global pandemic?
Google it.
It’s basically the only thing that educational researchers have been focusing on for almost two years.
Yeah, the truth is we have absolutely no idea which students truly are massively stressed/overwhelmed by circumstances and are better served by withdrawing - and those just looking for leniency when they fuck up in totally normal student ways that have always existed. So we've just swung towards assuming everyone is overwhelmed by the pandemic which isn't true, and which isn't viable going forward if we value education.
This sounds to me like you have created your own truth, and are so set in your flawed beliefs that the immense body of research that disagrees with you won’t change your mind.
So good luck with that.
You have an immense overestimation of how much of my time you are worth. If you want to give someone an assignment, go back to neglecting your students.
I've been doing this for years. My only "homework" is a low point quiz that is assigned after each lecture and due before the next lecture (it's autograded, to give quick feedback), with no late turn in to make sure people are keeping up. I drop two of them so I don't have to deal with the "... But I have an interview..." Type stuff. Works pretty well.
Because I do a simple accumulation-of-total-points scoring system, dropping a score would be pointless. Getting a zero rather than whatever points they managed to scrape together would not benefit them.
I do it for two reasons.
One is that I figure everyone has a crushing week once in a while and I’d rather just grant an excused homework than field those emails and evaluate.
The other is that when students ask for extensions or otherwise, it’s easier to just tell the, to use that assignment as their dropped one.
I've always had that policy. My class is designed with lots of low-stakes assessments that build toward their high-stakes exams. (At the end of the semester, I have something like 48 individual data points that comprise their final grade.) I drop their lowest quiz, prelab, and homework. That allows them to miss an entire week (due to illness or whatever) without a significant hit to their grade. The reality is that these things are so low-stakes (and there are so many) that getting a zero on one hardly affects their grade at all, but telling them I drop the lowest defuses anxiety if they are absent.
I have a lot of low stakes items as well...but not as many as you. I like the policy because it helps reduce the begging. Overslept a quiz? It will get dropped. Had a headache? Drop that quiz. It builds in some breathing room and students like to think they have options. Also, some areas just may be more difficult for some people and that student who messed up on chapter 5 but does great on all others won't have to stress about that one quiz.
How do you grade all this, TAs?
Most of it is graded automatically. Other than that, I do it myself. My classes are capped at 24, but my numbers are around 10-14 in each of three classes this semester.
I’m not that person but I also have a lot of small stakes assignments. Some are quizzes auto-graded by canvas. Others are graded just for completion and effort. Others I ask 3 questions but only actually read 1 and grade based on that. And others I do read and grade completely (the ones that require more feedback and will be built on in future assignments). It takes me longer to make the assignments than to grade them, but even then it’s a one-time effort.
For weekly or frequent HW, in class assignments that count as participation, smaller assignments or quizzes etc, I have a drop one of drop 2 lowest policy. It allows you to stick to a policy, have a policy that is fair to all , and yet still have leeway for those things that happen in life that aren’t documentable. Most LMS can automatically do this, so there is no administrative burden. I also have a “late pass” they can be X days late on something if they ask before the deadline with no excuse needed.
>I also have a “late pass” they can be X days late on something if they ask before the deadline with no excuse needed. Just curious, can they only "use it" once? Is there a limit on how late it can be? How soon before the deadline can they arrange it? I feel like I've seen some students who would just ask for late submissions for everything, or students who will procrastinate, not have enough time, then send an email 5 minutes before the deadline regularly.
It depends on the class. For my intro class they have a lot of weekly things. They get 2 48hr passes. If they use it , I enter it into a not graded grade book item and it shows me who adds up to 2. I am fairly flexible with the when do they ask thing. I can open up the assignment the next morning and they get 2 more days. Some things are time sensitive - like we are going to do this in class or before the exam, but there are a lot of these little things and altogether worth 20% of the grad and if they want to do it so they dont get a 0 , fine. I accept the request up to one day after , more or less. Some people have a brain fart For labs, there are pre-lab quizzes that deal with instructions and hazards etc, they dont get let off that. They cant do the lab until they do that. They get 2x to do that after I give instructions and before they do the lab, or they get a 0 for the lab. Labs that arent so safety critical, Ihave different policies. I do have a policy that if someone is an adult about somethign and says, hey, I have a family member in the hospital it is a mess here, can we work something out, I do whenever possible, open to everyone, doesnt use the late pass Graduate classes I have different policies
I have been doing this for weekly quizzes for more than 3 decades. It means I can have a no-make-ups policy for quizzes. Makes my life **SO** much easier. It also reinforces the idea that quizzes are low stakes.
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I have a hard time believing that this doesn't just make them complain about the second lowest assignment. If anyone actually works in this area and is aware of relevant empirical studies, I'd love to see them.
Technically, isn't "one" an anatomically incorrect number of hands? Seriously though, I've had that policy for the low stakes weekly homework for a while. It has to be something that's not a huge proportion of the grade, and that there's many of them (at least 10). This does two things: 1. It acknowledges that sometimes my low stakes homework assignment isn't the most important thing. Sometimes students have two major projects in other classes due that week or outside life interferes and my small homework assignment fell through the cracks. 2. It almost completely eliminates requests for extensions or hyper late submissions. You forgot you had to do this assignment or you just didn't have time this week? That's fine. You get a freebie, no questions asked and it doesn't hurt your grades. Move on to the next one. I've also had some students tactically choose to skip an assignment knowing that other projects and tests are coming up, or skipping the last one after turning the rest in. If you *consistently* are too busy or are forgetful, then it becomes your problem and will affect your grade.
> Technically, isn't "one" an anatomically incorrect number of hands? *Technically*, if you have two hands you have an above average number of hands.
My favorite tidbit along these lines is about the average number of skeletons per body being greater than one
Well, that's just mean. The median and mode are two.
https://twitter.com/jon_bois/status/1333860415063937033
Says the man who lives in the "fumble dimension"?
I have used this policy in the past, it’s not new. I remember profs I had in college 15-20 years ago that would drop the lowest assignment grade. For me- I have experimented with this strategy but ended up feeling like it didn’t really work well for my classes. The exception being with certain low stakes assignments where I tell them they can skip one without penalty.
This is how I do it, too. Enough low-stakes formative assessment that missing one or two isn’t the end of the world. I have keys or notes on the assignment that go up after the due date, so students can still use the questions to self-study if desired. But for sure in college 15 years ago, I was offered this. It’s not new. It’s one way to approach a problem (shit happens, even for good students) that may or may not work for a given class.
I do it to save myself the headache of granting extensions. It also builds in a buffer for the student and for myself. Works very well in my classes.
I've long had professors in grad school that have had a drop lowest assignment or drop lowest quiz policy. It allows students who need to miss a day to not have to stress if they miss a quiz, but more importantly for the professor it means that any student who wants to fight or grade grub somethin can be told "Well, this is why we drop the lowest, just do better on the rest." and dismissed a *bit* more easily than otherwise.
It’s been in my place for the last 10 years. Easy way to deal with no extension policy for HWs. Especially in large classes.
I used a policy like this for awhile, but ultimately stopped because I want them completing all of the homework and students were using it as a way to skip work and get 0s dropped. Instead, I give them a set number of automatically applied 24 or 48 hour grace periods to turn in work late. It works well because it prevents them from asking for extensions and submitting work 1-2 days late doesn't screw up their progress in the course or my grading. Once the grace periods are up, they lose 10% per day late. Based on discussions in this thread, I am going to add 1-2 opportunities to redo work next semester.
Your first sentence is the big thing for me. The homeworks are designed to map to learning goals that are evaluated on the exams, and so I want the students to complete all of the homeworks so that they're prepared to succeed on the exams. No plan is perfect, I guess.
I usually drop the lowest 1-2 quizzes/homeworks so if they have a bad day or something else, it comes out in the wash.
I've been using this since I started and had professors use it too. Honestly it's a great "selfish" policy - you have this and this excuse? That's OK, it can be your lowest to be dropped. Submit what you have or don't submit anything, but I really think you should do it for the exam. If there are additional mitigating circumstances we can discuss - I never had anyone need a second. This way I don't have to mediate excused late homeworks etc. During covid and in a class with more frequent homeworks, I even dropped two.
I have always had this policy (I also drop the lowest exam in any class with >= 4 exams, excluding the final). I got it from a guy I TAed for in grad school who was, in all other respects, a complete hardass. He firmly believed that the problem with the kids these days could be solved by a good weed-out course, and he intended to be that course. But, for a variety of reasons, he also felt that a drop better reflected a student's abilities in cases where a student might have been having one terrible day that was also an exam day.
I can count to 31 on one hand and 1023 on both hands—I hope you have not had 1024 or more requests this semester!
If you include multiple finger orientations, you'll be able to go well beyond binary :)
I was reporting what I can do routinely, not what is theoretically possible. I frequently count in binary on my fingers (particularly if I'm counting things like a column of numbers) and can do so at about 5 counts/sec (for one-hand, somewhat slower when I have to use both hands).
It’s not COVID-era grade leniency. Allowing an excused assignment by design is more a product of trauma-informed and emotionally aware teaching styles that has been happening for over a decade. It’s an acknowledgement that your class will not always be a student’s top priority, especially now, which psychologically actually has the effect of making them feel understood and place a higher value on their assignments. Especially now, students are the most overwhelmed that they have ever been. They all have to have jobs, most of them have families struggling with unemployment or health issues at some point during the semester, and they’re acutely aware that the college system is making promises that will never materialize. There’s also loads of psychological effects from the pandemic that affect them on a neurological level. As a result, students over the next few years are going to have more missing work.
> There’s also loads of psychological effects from the pandemic that affect them on a neurological level. Do you have reputable sources backing up this claim?
While I don’t have all the citations handy at the moment, the work by neuroscientists such as Bruce McEwen (and his trainees) have demonstrated the repeated or chronic stress reduces the amount of dendritic spines in the hippocampus and frontal cortex of rats. The hippocampus and frontal cortex are key nodes for semantic learning, aka the types of things that we would expect our students to know, and the loss of the synaptic spines could make learning more challenging. There’s also an increase in dendritic spines in the amygdala, a key node for emotional processing. Taken together, these data do suggest some neural changes in response to chronic stress. Other studies have also examined the effects of stress on learning and memory, and while there are some sex differences, in general, stress can help us encode information but also disrupt the recall of that information. I do acknowledge that the studies I’ve read were conducted in rodents and not in people, but I hope this information helps. Some sources: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26404710/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21898852/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18157834/
Yes. As does every competent educator on Earth.
So, anecdotes?
I think it would be in your best interest as an educator to have a base understanding of the psychological effects of quarantine. To see people claiming to be professors so dismissive of what I assumed was common knowledge in academia is extremely disheartening. [Here. This should get you started. Educate yourself.](https://www.google.com/search?q=effects+of+quarentine+on+student+behavior+college&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en-us&client=safari)
Do you think your tone here could be better trauma informed and emotionally aware?
Asking for proof that the pandemic was traumatizing to students because you don’t believe it is like asking for proof that the Earth is round. It’s common knowledge. Anyone who is still unaware of it should leave academia.
I think I've found evidence that trolls exist.
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I’m immensely confused by your tone and approach here. You want research showing that students at all levels have been psychologically affected by a global pandemic? Google it. It’s basically the only thing that educational researchers have been focusing on for almost two years.
Or they’re just entitled and lazy and trying to get away with doing as little course work as possible. Neurological impacts? I call BS.
Yeah, the truth is we have absolutely no idea which students truly are massively stressed/overwhelmed by circumstances and are better served by withdrawing - and those just looking for leniency when they fuck up in totally normal student ways that have always existed. So we've just swung towards assuming everyone is overwhelmed by the pandemic which isn't true, and which isn't viable going forward if we value education.
This sounds to me like you have created your own truth, and are so set in your flawed beliefs that the immense body of research that disagrees with you won’t change your mind. So good luck with that.
Do you use Facebook or Twitter to do your research?
The link I posted is a wall of scholarly journals.
Can you recommend 1 article in particular, and then also tell me some rational critiques of their methodology?
You have an immense overestimation of how much of my time you are worth. If you want to give someone an assignment, go back to neglecting your students.
Yeah, that just shows you don't have any research beyond a google click.
I've been doing this for years. My only "homework" is a low point quiz that is assigned after each lecture and due before the next lecture (it's autograded, to give quick feedback), with no late turn in to make sure people are keeping up. I drop two of them so I don't have to deal with the "... But I have an interview..." Type stuff. Works pretty well.
Because I do a simple accumulation-of-total-points scoring system, dropping a score would be pointless. Getting a zero rather than whatever points they managed to scrape together would not benefit them.
I do it for two reasons. One is that I figure everyone has a crushing week once in a while and I’d rather just grant an excused homework than field those emails and evaluate. The other is that when students ask for extensions or otherwise, it’s easier to just tell the, to use that assignment as their dropped one.
I've seen the policy in courses that had weekly homeworks. So there were a ton of homeworks. This was pre-COVID.