Argthtjtr

I am the course lecturer of an undergraduate course.
For a recent assignment, I had written the assignment deadline as 23 November 2018 (Saturday). Unfortunately, 23 November is actually a Friday, and not a Saturday.

I received an email from a student asking for me to excuse his/her assignment which was submitted late. The student explained that he/she marked the deadline as Saturday, without checking the assignment date.

Question

Should I excuse the student's late submission because I made a slight mistake in specifying the assignment deadline?

Note: We use a learning management system to receive assignment submissions, and the assignment deadline was entered correctly in the learning management system.

What I decided to do

For the current incident:
After reading the answers, and thinking it through, I decided that it is better to use the later of the two deadlines (i.e., 24 November Saturday) as the official deadline for the assignment.
I did make a mistake in writing the wrong day of the week for the deadline,
and students could have been misled with my mistake.
It is not fair to punish such students for my mistake.

For future courses:

• The more places I put the deadline in
  (e.g., the syllabus, the assignment itself, the learning management system),
  it becomes likely that I will make a mistake somewhere.


• In the future, I will put the deadline in only the learning management system, and refer students to check the deadlines there.

In dubio pro reo (in a case where nothing happened anyway)

Mistakes happen. Like you writing the wrong day for a certain date. Happened once, the "damage" is that students may have a reason to hand in one day later. That's it. And that's basically nothing.

Students are humans too. Most probably he really did not pay too much attention, did not look it up properly. Like no one of us would have or normally does in his daily business. And that's fine. Because it was not about life and death.

Let it be like that and accept the hand-in saying that you really wrote the wrong day (and may even apologize for the small mistake, as it may caused some confusion and a little anxiety to the student when he realized it). Even thinking about that incident is too much energy wasted for nothing happened. And be happy that you did not write the date of a test wrong or similar. Keep the mouse a mouse, don't make it an elephant.

Also, not accepting it will result in punishing a (most probably) innocent student. That's just unfair and will leave a very bad impression with the student. No reason to risk that.

If the assignment deadline was not shown correctly to the students, then it is your error and they cannot be penalized for being late.

Claiming it is correct in one area while incorrect in another does not absolve you, you caused the confusion so you have to accept late submissions, as long as they arrived on Saturday...

Any submissions on Sunday will, of course, be late.

Re-reading this, it sounds a bit blunt... Probably because I have done exactly the same and had to sort it out after... Peace reigns if you stick to being fair, so giving them the extra time does not usually make much of a difference, except for the recognition from the students.

If you occasionally published two different dates as a deadline, you should accept the work until the latest date without penalty. This is what essentially happened: you announced the deadline as 23rd Nov 2018 but also as Saturday, which is not the same day. Go with the latest of two then — this is the best way to be fair in this situation.

I think the most important question a teacher should ask about their own actions is "What my action will teach?"

If you accept the late submission you will teach that one must assume their own mistakes and get full responsibility.

If you don't, you will teach that the people with more power don't need to clean up and take responsibility after mistakes, and the underdogs should not trust them.

We can say the last will prepare the student to be a good employee in the corporate world, and the first to be a responsible person.

Purely from a standpoint of error distance, I would probably put more trust in the spelled-out day than in a numeric date, if there's any conflict between the two, because it's much more likely to accidentally hit 3 instead of 4 than to type Satur when you meant to type Fri. Of course that only applies to the mechanical aspect of typing, for most brains it's probably just as easy to mix the two up.

In any case, unless you noticed your error and communicated an unambiguous correction within a reasonable timeframe, it seems only fair that you should accept submissions up to the latest possible reasonable interpretation of the originally communicated deadline.

I say “reasonable" interpretation, because I guess the latest possible interpretation would be Saturday, November 23rd of the next year in which November 23rd is a Saturday. (This wouldn’t make sense in an academic context, but it’s a possible result of a typo in some longer-range planning.)