I have noticed the following interesting phenomenon. Professors who graduated from not-so-prestigious programs keep saying things like “We get inferior-quality students here. If only we got the kind of students that they get at Harvard / Princeton / MIT, then it would be really easy to teach. We need to ride their asses to show them what it means to have high standards.”
On the other hand, professors who graduated from Stanford / Johns Hopkins/ Brown, etc say “Our students are exactly the same as students at Stanford / Cornell / Princeton, etc. Students are the same everywhere. There is no point in being all ‘two absences and you fail the course!’ or “an A is 90%. 89,99% is a B!'”
Works every single time.
Clarissa's Blog 
This would not work with me.
“There is no point in being all ‘two absences and you fail the course!’ or “an A is 90%. 89,99% is a B”.”
WHAT?
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There is also stuff like “The assignment has to be emailed before 3:59. So if it’s time-stamped 4:00, YOU FAIL!”
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I know the last one very well. (Some use a 10% per working day rule)
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People should get a life.
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They all do that. You’re the only one that I know who doesn’t.
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I am in total agreement on all the draconian nonsense.
If a student has a huge chemistry exam the same day a paper is due in my class, I understand the decision to study for the exam and finish my paper the next day. I can’t read all of the papers at the same time and getting a few of them a day or two later is zero inconvenience for me.
I do tend to be strict with the number to letter conversion at the end, but I am fairly generous about everything else all semester, so if the number isn’t there, they probably don’t deserve the higher grade.
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Ah well, I’m one of the professors that you hate. I have quite loosey-goosey deadlines in my upper-division classes, because those are small and have a handful of relatively high-stakes assignments. A late paper here and there is no big deal: ten points off the top for every day it is late. But in my freshman-level surveys, where they have low-stakes two-page assignments due every other Friday, those hard copies are either in my hand at 2 p.m. sharp or they are late and I am not taking them.
The primary reason: people are people, and they do things at the last minute. Before I had this policy, on every day a paper was due, roughly 15 of the 50 students in the class would show up anywhere from two minutes to half an hour late, open the door at the front of the classroom, walk in and throw everybody’s attention off for the next thirty seconds as they dropped their paper off and wandered around looking for an empty seat.
The secondary reason: I teach at a place with a 4/4 load. I often have three sections of fifty students, which means 150 short papers coming in every other week. I have neither the time nor the inclination to deal with late papers in that situation. (I should mention that this is a “three lowest grades are dropped” kind of thing, so if your car wouldn’t start on some random day, it shouldn’t really be a big deal.)
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