A reminder that turning in assignments for partial credit is better than not turning them in at all. It is. Even if you think you’ve done a bad job and are ashamed of your work, or it’s way overdue, you take whatever you can get. Partial credit dramatically improves your grade over a zero, and I’m always astounded by how often even the smartest kids don’t really comprehend that. 60% is worlds better than 0%. Even 10% is going to help you. Letter grades are misleading and are not created equal. “F"s are mathematically valuable. Turn that late assignment in.
Please, all new teachers and TAs, don’t be that person who decides you’re going to keep your students in line with a strict ‘no late assignments’ policy. Yes, I know the ‘real world’ has a stricter policy on deadlines than grade school or college does, but encouraging your students to do their work is a more important way to prepare them for the rest of their lives than punishing them for making poor time management decisions. When I started teaching intro Microbiology labs, I put all of my discretionary points into penalizing lateness and unfair division of labwork between partners, because the goal of teaching is to make sure the children are there for the lectures and physically doing the things they need to learn. A 30, 40, or 50% penalty to the grade is more than enough to make your point about meeting deadlines.
A 100% penalty just encourages your students to completely give up if they’ve made a bad choice. Maybe that’s really good at teaching respect for deadlines (and maybe it isn’t) but if that student doesn’t do that work, you’ve missed the most important teaching moment of all: the one where your student was supposed to commit to their education on their own time and learn the material you’re actually supposed to be teaching them, especially if that material is difficult or uninteresting to them.
The Archery Range 