Today, I shot an e-mail off to one of my students working on a thesis. The gist of it was this: since you haven't handed in the required amount of work by the first deadline, you'd better withdraw from the course, or receive an F. Within hours, I got a response, pleading for more time. It was the first message from said student in about three weeks.
It really is funny how that works.
I've been doing this kind of thing for years, as the deadline to withdraw from classes approaches. Doesn't matter what the class is: you announce in class (or now electronically) that students who have handed in little to no work after five weeks should withdraw, and amazingly, their calendar clears, the work obligations change, their personal problems or health issues subside enough to... ask for more time! And to be truthful, sometimes they actually hand in work!
Every situation is different, and how I respond to late submissions can depend on too many variables to share here. But one scenario is among the most interesting: the choice between failing a student and giving the student a grade of Incomplete.
In theory, this is an easy deal, because there are usually rules at any college that govern when a student can be given an Incomplete grade. It's supposed to be given in cases where a student needs more time to complete the course work, and has a "serious reason" why s/he cannot complete the work on time. There's a lot of vagueness out there in student handbooks. For most classes, a student who hands in, say more than half the required work, has taken all the tests, but has one more assignment and needs more time because s/he got sick for two weeks near the end of the term, might be a good candidate for an Incomplete. Someone else who did hardly any work, did poorly on exams (or even skipped the midterm), is not a candidate. Common sense can prevail.
But common sense does not always apply to the college student. Many see a grade of Incomplete as another means to slack off, and if the professors don't follow up, the grade lingers beyond the standard deadline, and not all institutions just automatically change such grades to F. So, let's say you've got a student who could use a little more time to get the work done, especially the work of a senior thesis, which means someone who is really really close to getting his/her degree. In the old days, we might just not submit a grade at all until the work was done, but that really fosters laziness and apparently missing grades is a no-no because of financial aid issues. So: do you just give the kid an F, and THEN, when the stuff actually comes in (usually within 48 hours of the student realize s/he's just screwed up bigtime), file a change of grade form from F to whatever? Or give the Incomplete grade, often prolonging the inevitable change to F?
I think it's all psychological: you see that F and you realize the gravity of your situation. The Incomplete grade is a license to ignore the problem until the last minute. (Of course the last minute should really be in the fourteenth or fifteenth week of the term, not three weeks after finals.)
But is that the right thing for faculty to do? Doesn't changing a grade from an F to a passing grade, and doing so a few times a semester, defeat the purpose of the F grade? We're supposed to change grades infrequently; the reason for grade changes, aside from Incomplete grades (or the notorious "ABsent from final exam" grade, wherein a student doesn't show for finals, gets a reprieve, and takes a makeup test that may be easier than the one his/her classmates got), should be compelling: maybe you reconsidered some grades after the student appealed, or maybe you actually did make a computation error. To go from F to, say, a B seems like a big jump; it says you're circumnavigating the Incomplete-grade system by accepting work after the grade is in.
Again, theory and practices don't often mesh. In some ways, giving the F is also a short cut, since some of the students might not even bother to do the work. (I've had more than a few students simply disappear after they've asked for more time, or a chance to hand in late work to change a bad grade.) But I gotta say: it's a short cut that can really produce prolific undergraduate scholarship.
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