Course policies
You are adjudicating whose emergency is real
You are reading a third email this week explaining a private medical situation, and deciding, on no training whatsoever, whether it clears the bar.
What it is
Policies written so that flexibility is granted in advance rather than requested. The fellowship’s framing is that equitable policies give students room to set their own priorities and should not place undue burden on them.
Two policies cover most of it. Grace days are a small fixed number of no-questions-asked extension days. Dropped scores remove the lowest one or two in any repeated low-stakes category, automatically.
Four design choices carry the weight. It is bounded, so it does not become an alternative schedule. It is automatic, because the moment you say yes or no you are adjudicating again. It requires no explanation. And it is excluded where lateness would cost someone other than the student.
The no-explanation rule is the whole practice. Granting extensions on request, with a reason, sounds equivalent and is not. It allocates flexibility by who is most fluent at describing hardship to authority and most comfortable disclosing private circumstances to someone who grades them. Those are not the students with the least slack in their lives.
Run it
- Three grace days, any non-exam assignment, no advance notice, no reason given. After that, an ordinary late penalty.
- Drop the lowest one or two scores in any repeated low-stakes category, automatically.
- Make attendance expected but not punitively graded, and assess participation through substantive contributions, in class or in writing.
- Say it out loud in week one. Students have met syllabus language promising flexibility that evaporated on contact, and a policy nobody believes produces the extension emails anyway.
Say this
Syllabus text
“Each student receives 3 grace days that may be applied to any non-exam assignment without penalty and without explanation. To use one, submit late and note in your submission comment that you are using a grace day. You do not need to email me in advance and you do not need to tell me why.
After grace days are exhausted, 2% is deducted for each 24 hours past the due date.”
In my courses
Planned for EPI 601, set in the syllabus in week 1.
I will implement a flexible deadline policy: students receive 3 ‘grace days’ to use across the semester on any assignment without penalty or explanation. The late work policy will be framed in the syllabus with a rationale: learning is the goal, and rigid deadlines can disproportionately burden students facing personal challenges. Attendance will be expected but not punitively graded; instead, participation will be assessed through substantive contributions (in-class or written alternatives).
The syllabus revision replaces rigid late-penalty language with the grace-day system and states the equity rationale alongside it. Exams stay closed-book and timed, and grace days do not apply to them. New for 601; not used before the fellowship.
Evidence
Three observational studies, and what they do is refute the exploitation worry rather than demonstrate an effect. Extension use showed no significant association with gender, race, or first-generation status (Ganguly et al., 2025), and in a course with 78 percent uptake there was no final-grade difference between users and non-users (Ruesch & Sarvary, 2024).
None of it is randomized and none of it shows students learn more. What it shows is that the thing people fear does not appear to happen.
Students consume whatever window you give them regardless of assignment type (Conner, 2024), so the bound is doing real work. Exclude exams and anything with downstream dependencies, such as a scaffolded milestone a peer reviewer is waiting on.