Universities, wonderful as they are, can be very complicated.
The way that we operate can often be confusing for students, not least because some of our expectations and traditions are hidden and unspoken – even more so for students who enter higher education from historically underrepresented backgrounds.
Indeed, revealing the so-called hidden curriculum in higher education is a common means by which we try to eliminate gaps in access and outcome.
But there are also times when, as a sector, we should be more critical of the way we do things, whether those practices are hidden or unhidden.
Here we want to share an example of what happens when you challenge orthodoxy, and why we think we should do this more often.
Assessment penalties
If you spend some time reviewing UK university policies on assessment and examination, you will find that it is almost universally the case that there are penalties associated with late or non-submission.
Typically, this involves a deduction of marks. Sometimes late submissions will be capped at a pass, other times the deduction is linked to the degree of lateness. Similarly, students who fail to submit an assessment or sit an exam will often find that their next attempt at resit will be capped.
Of course, institutions do recognise that there may be lots of good reasons why students cannot meet deadlines, and so alongside these penalties, we also have Extenuating or Mitigating Circumstances processes. In short, if a student tells us the reason they were late or could not submit, then they may be exempted from those penalties if the reasons meet our established criteria.
What is far harder to find is any robust explanation, in written form, of why these penalties exist in the first place. There is much received wisdom (as you would expect, for a sector so steeped in tradition) for why we have these penalties, which – in our experience – typically falls into two categories.
The first justification is about using penalties to disincentivise lateness or non-submission. If students know they will lose marks, that will ensure that most submit on time. The second justification is about fairness. If you submit late, you are getting more time than other students, so you should not receive a higher mark as a result of this presumed advantage. Each of these justifications could be debated endlessly, but we don’t intend to do that here.
Questioning the received wisdom
The reason we began to question the wisdom of capping students who submitted their work late, or who needed to use their resit attempt, was prompted by insights which emerged from work led by our SU. Over the past few years, our SU has been supporting students who needed to complete resits by calling them to ensure that they understood what they needed to get done, and had access to the support they needed. In itself, this initiative has been very impactful, and we are seeing year-on-year improvements in student pass rates.
However, this initiative also gave our students a chance to share their own insights into why they found themselves having to resit assessments. In plain terms, our students were telling us – we are overwhelmed.
Students who did not submit assignments were not being tactical or lazy, or trying to gain an advantage over others. They were simply not able to get all of the work done that we required in the time given – despite substantial efforts we have already made over the last few years to ensure we are not over-assessing.
At the same time, we had been aware for some time that our students were using our Extenuating Circumstances (ECs) process extensively. Thousands of valid claims were made by students each year, which we processed and – for the substantial majority – supported.
This meant that our students who were submitting late or completing resits were not, for the most part, actually being subjected to marking caps. Perhaps we could have stopped there, reflecting that this reflects a system working as it was designed to work: students with valid reasons for late submission should not be capped; we had a system which allowed students to make such claims to avoid penalties; and it seemed the system was well-used.
What we could not shake, however, was a sense that this all seemed quite unnecessary – layers of bureaucracy needing to exist to ensure that students who did not deserve to have an academic penalty applied to their mark, while the very existence of the possibility of this penalty was entirely our own decision. We asked ourselves what would happen if we simply removed marking penalties for late and non-submissions? If students were awarded a mark based solely on the content of their submission? If we created a late submission window for every deadline, and allowed students to manage their own time?
We took this idea to a panel of our students, and were intrigued to hear their views. Overwhelmingly, they felt this would be a good idea. The stress of having to apply for extra time, often close to a deadline if some unexpected problem had arisen which threatened their ability to submit on time, was something students felt would be alleviated by this change. They also reflected that, for the most part, students are inherently motivated to try and meet their deadlines, and aren’t simply trying to game the system and find loopholes.
Yes but
Concerns about this change came from internal and external consultation with colleagues. While in principle wanting to support the idea, it was difficult to shake the concerns that 1) without a penalty for late submission, students would simply treat the last day of the late submission window as their new deadline, and 2) if resits were not penalised with a cap, many students would choose to not submit at the first attempt and defer their submission to a later date.
We also had to consider, if these outcomes came to pass, the impact on staff workloads and marking turnaround times. With these concerns in mind, taking a careful approach to how we communicated changes to students and putting in place contingencies for managing impacts on workloads, we ultimately decided to take the plunge, and at the start of the 24/25 academic year we removed marking caps for late and non-submission. Then we kept a close eye on what happened next.
What happened next is that our students did what we believed and hoped they would.
Across the first semester this year, we have actually seen a small decline in the percentage of late submissions – with only 12.22% of work submitted being submitted within the 5 working day late submission window.
All other work was submitted on or before the main deadline. By comparison, in 23/24 12.32% was submitted late, and 12.41% in 22/23, so it is perhaps more accurate to say that there has been no change in late submissions.
But this was, of course, accompanied by a dramatic reduction in the number of times that students have had to request the option to submit late through our ECs process (and then worry about whether this request would be supported).
These claims have reduced by 154 per cent, thereby also alleviating a huge administrative burden on our colleagues who have to process these claims. In short, students who in previous years needed extra time have been able to access it without having to ask, and removing the threat of a marking penalty has not increased the proportion of students submitting their work late.
The concern that if students were not capped for non-submission then they might defer sitting exams has also proven unfounded. In fact, we have seen a 5 per cent increase in the number of students attempting their exam first time. In numerical terms, we had 370 fewer students failing to attend an exam during our January exam period.
Student success
While it is reassuring to have found that this change in policy has not led to any significant change in students’ engagement with deadlines and assessments, more importantly we also wanted to know whether our students were more likely to succeed.
The data quoted above could have masked another issue, whereby students who did submit work were no more likely to submit past the deadline, but perhaps more students were not submitting at the first attempt and instead were deferring to their resit period.
To explore this issue, we compared first time pass rates for first semester assessments to the previous academic year. This has revealed a 4.3 per cent improvement in pass rates at first attempt, with the biggest improvement of 6 per cent for our first-year undergraduates.
When looked at by student characteristic, we have also seen the greatest degree of improvement for our ABMO students and our male students, who have historically been more likely to not pass assessments at their first attempt.
Statistics aside, in human terms, this change in policy (which sits within a wider context of strategic initiatives we have in place to improve student outcomes for all of our students) is associated with us having 604 more students who have passed at their first attempt this year, than we would have had if pass rates had stayed the same as last year.
With regard to concerns about the impact of this change on staff workloads, having more students passing first time also means a reduction in resit marking later in the academic year.
Complex challenges
For those interested in the practicalities of our new approach, we still have an Extenuating Circumstances procedure, but this is now intended as a mechanism for students to let us know about more complex challenges where a few days extra time would be inadequate to help them successfully engage with their assessments.
We have also made clear to students that late submitted work is still recorded as being late (but with no marking penalty applied), and if students continually submit work late we will – in a supportive manner – reach out to find out if they need more or different support from us.
We will continue to monitor the impact of these changes, in particular to understand whether there is any overall impact on student outcomes over the full year and beyond – particularly outcome gaps for different groups of students. But so far, our experience has been that making a change which initially seemed quite radical has simply served to make life easier for our students when they are already working so hard to access and participate in education.
It is also important to recognise that extra time in itself is not a panacea for improving student outcomes, despite it being the most common form of adjustment offered to disabled students.
By making this change in our approach, we were simply trying to make this very simple accommodation immediately available to any student who needs it, for whatever reason.
This massively reduces a large administrative burden on the university, and frees us up to focus on more personalised forms of support, for students who need more than a few extra days to complete an assignment.
The reason we are keen to share this with the sector is that we think it is a good example of how we can better support our students by challenging our own self-imposed orthodoxy. It is great to think that we have been able to reduce the anxiety associated with missing deadlines, without having to worry that our students will cynically use this change to game the system.
We strongly believe that our students are inherently motivated to engage with their studies and do the best they can, and we think it is our job to make sure we are not getting in the way of them doing that.
If, in the process, we can cut out unnecessary administration and bureaucracy for ourselves, then so much the better.
I understood penalties for late submission and resits as being due to the way we measure achievement in an Outcome-based Education system (notional learning hours etc). If student achievement is measured against time, then more time means reduced achievement.
It would be interesting to know if the above was considered in implementing this change, as well as if there was any modelling of possible grade inflation, or discussion around how varying from the sector norms (as much as the vast range of different penalties, lengths of lates submission periods and number of attempts can be considered norms) would be perceived by all stakeholders.
Certainly, the trend of huge numbers of accepted extenuating circumstances claims is calling out for a more elegant and less bureaucracy-intensive solution, and I applaud the boldness of approach!
That’s a great question, and is something we discussed. We do still maintain lots of assessments which are in some way time constrained, where the ability to demonstrate a learning outcome within a time limit is an explicit competence being assessed. For example, OSCE assessments in health, oral presentations, performances, practical assessments of various kinds. The issue we were grappling with is whether this validly applies to all assessments.
For most coursework assessments, the brief is given at the very start of a module, so students may already have months to start thinking about and working on it (albeit they won’t have covered all of the required learning in the module until later on). The 5 working day window is more about recognising students have complicated lives, and are balancing multiple deadlines (university related and otherwise), and so giving them a little flexibility so they can perform at their best is what matters. Unless time and meeting a deadline is a specific (and explicitly stated and justified) learning outcome, we don’t see an issue from a quality perspective.
I’m not sure I understand. So students can submit with no penalty up to 5 days after a deadline – not the worst thing, though deadlines for coursework are a model for life after graduation surely, where deadlines exist…?
But anyway, if they need more than 5 days, they still need to do an EC claim and the same supposedly nonsensical grade caps/no-grade regulations still apply?
On your second point first, students who can’t submit within 5 working days would then have another chance at the next resit (in other words, late submission beyond 5 working days doesn’t exist). Students don’t need to make a claim for having caps removed, as we don’t cap resits.
The bigger question of whether deadlines are also a model for working life is something we debated at length. Importantly, we recognise that our students are constantly working to deadlines and meeting ‘time targets’. Turn up late for a class? You’ve missed some of your learning. Fail to submit your student finance claim on time? You might be facing months of financial hardship as your loan will arrive late. Exams require you to be on time, as do practical assessments and performances.
The issue we have is with the cliff edge for coursework assessments, and the use of academic marking penalties for even very small amounts of lateness. And, as our data shows, the vast majority of students are still meeting the main deadline – only 12% are needing to use some of the extra 5 working days.
One thought about the decline in students not submitting on time, perhaps in the hope of a ‘strategic fail’, to get a better time or form of assessment on the resit, is I do wonder if there has been a tightening of the types of assessment set for resits. Typically strategic fails would be when the student wanted to avoid a particular piece of assessment and preferred the form of the resit if that was indeed in a different form. The classic example was to have an individual or group presentation for the first sit of the assessment but because often it would occur after classes had finished, for the resit to have a written piece of work or presentation not to a class, or for example, recorded, instead. I have seen a move to eliminate the differences in first sit and resit versions and wondered if this might have also contributed to the changes outlined here.
Often traditional exams are popular with students in contrast to presentations especially if done in a group. I might be wrong, but I do wonder if a greater prevalence of traditional forms of assessment even though they may not address the range of skills other forms do, may be an encouraging factor for students not to hesitate or intentionally delay to get away from those forms they dislike.
This is a really interesting approach and always good to question our default practices. I do wonder how this will play out in the longer term. Because in terms of penalties, it looks like you’ve replaced a graduated penalty (late penalty up to 5 days, then capped at pass mark beyond that), with a single penalty 5 days later (capped at pass mark). It’ll be interesting to see whether students adjust by gradually treating the 5 day deadline as the real deadline or whether your interventions and support prevent this.
Secondly, I would still argue that while meeting deadlines may be part of the hidden curriculum of higher education, it is also part of the ‘hidden skillset’ that employers expect from graduates.
And on a very minor point – I don’t understand how it can be that extenuating circumstances”claims have reduced by 154 per cent”. Once you’ve reduced them by 100% you have no more claims left, so it’s impressive to get a further 54% decrease on this!
To clarify, we now only apply penalties for academic misconduct. Submission links close after 5 working days, meaning if students can’t get the work in by the cut off, they have to attempt at the next opportunity (which also won’t be capped). What we’ve heard from our students is that they do want to meet deadlines, and the idea that they are tactically trying to always work to the latest date is a bit of a myth (at least, our data doesn’t support the idea).
While I agree that meeting deadlines is an employability skill, it doesn’t follow that we should be using academic penalties to shape this behaviour. And we do, after all, still have deadlines – it’s just that we are allowing students to utilise short extensions where they need them to manage their wider workload (an important employability skill in itself, I’d argue!).
And well spotted on that erroneous statistic – will get that fixed!
I had some experience of EC as a mature student. It would be interesting to see what proportion of students submitting late did so for all assignments, or just for one, because that would be another indicator as to whether they’re dealing with Life or making the most of a few more days.
When I was ill I prioritised exams and got an extension on the essays because the resit period would have been in the middle of the school holidays which was less than optimal. For those with caring responsibilities, it needs to be a mutual decision as to whether waiting for the resit period or a couple more weeks now is the better solution, especially if resits are out of term time.
When I later had a family crisis just before the assessment period and needed the full 3 weeks extension, it was actually incredibly stressful waiting for a decision – I had to submit one piece only partly done on the original deadline, because I didn’t get the exemption confirmed until later in the week. I then had some trouble getting the official progress transcript to show the mark from the second completed submission.
This is so interesting.
What software are you using for submission of work?
How have you reconciled this with the extra time reasonable adjustments for students with registered disabilities that require it? If a student requires an extra 5 days to prepare coursework, is this the same buffer period that all students now get, or on top of it (so deadline+5 “late” days+5 disability assessed days)? Could you describe the consultation in terms of this equity please?
When developing this idea, the first group we engaged with was our Disabled Student Panel, as we saw there potentially being issues around how this change interacted with the reasonable adjustment of additional time which is made available for some disabled students. The panel were strongly supportive of the change, and didn’t see a need to go down the “5+5” route. The reason is that our focus is on ensuring that the use of extra time, for any student for any reason, is an exception and not a norm. We aim to support all students to be able to meet their main deadlines, and our disabled student support plans are explicitly designed with this in mind.
It is also true that the majority of our disabled students with additional time in their support plans do not actually use the extra time for the majority of their assignments – and when it is used, students often only use some of the extra time.
Since making this change, we haven’t seen student behaviour changing in terms of their use of late submission (for both disabled and non-disabled students) – but this additional form of support is now easily accessible for any student who needs it.
Great article Tony.
Absolutely — you’ve summed it up really well. It strikes the right balance between structure and compassion. Most students do aim to meet deadlines, but knowing they have a buffer if life gets in the way can make a huge difference to their wellbeing and performance. That kind of trust and flexibility encourages maturity and self-regulation.
And you’re right — while Health has its non-negotiables due to professional requirements, the broader approach still sends a clear message that we’re here to support our students, not trip them up. It’s actually really nice to see such a thoughtful, student-centred policy being implemented.