Experiences With and Lessons Learned on Deadlines and Submission Behavior

Course exercises are typically given so that the time it takes to finish them fits in the time constraints of the academic system. Exercises come with deadlines that are considered to help students plan their schedules and consequently help get the exercises done. Without deadlines, exercises that need to be done may easily slide away to make room for other tasks that are seemingly more important. Even with deadlines, however, some students procrastinate and leave their tasks without attention until the very last moment. In this article, we study computer science course exercise deadlines by analyzing data from a course that had different deadline placements over the years. The deadline placements of the course were varied to identify a deadline that would be suitable for the majority—if not all—of students. Our analyses from six different deadlines demonstrate that some deadlines seem to reduce last-minute work on exercises. Our findings highlight that not all deadlines are the same and serves as a call for more research into deadline placement and their potential impacts on student time management and performance.