Update: see below for an important emendation.
Our Bellesiles discussion got into the tedious issue of verifying students’ tragic stories. In the last few years my policy has been to accept all stories at face value, and to tell students that this is my policy.
Rationale one: ever have someone tearfully unfold a beloved relative’s death notice in front of you? Boy did I feel like an asshole.
Rationale two: this enables me to tell students that the cost of a lie-based extension is…being the kind of person who pimps grandma’s corpse for a week’s delay in handing in a paper. Whether this is a genuine harm to their well-being is an interesting philosophical question.
Rationale three: they always use the rope to hang themselves anyway. The late work is never any good, and I like giving out Ds more than I like failing people. (Fs are usually for colossal screw-ups or just disappearing; a D is like, I tried, but I was still terrible.)
Rationale four: be honest, you’ve lied to editors. It’s not that I’ve been playing starcraft II for 36 straight hours, it’s that I’m thoughtfully correcting all the typos. So really it’s a more accurate simulation of professional life.
Update I: [deleted on account of me being a prick. Apologies to all concerned.]
Update II: more seriously, and on reflection, the excuses offered to editors et al. very well might be (literally) true, though I suspect they often violate implicatures.
Update III: on a more practical note, a general policy of flexibility with deadlines lowers the incentive to lie.
Update IV: come to think of it, there’s a slightly interesting question about when implicature violation counts as a lie.
35 comments
July 22, 2010 at 4:54 am
dana
In my experience, quite a lot of the tragic stories aren’t offered as an excuse for failing to turn in work, but because that as a young, female philosopher, I am obviously both a lover of wisdom and full of motherly compassion.
It would be wrong to demand proof in the middle of a casual and awkward conversation about a student’s struggles with depression and suicidal thoughts, and yet, I think that I was justified in softpedaling in the following classes the bit in Nietzsche where he says second best of all is to die soon.
July 22, 2010 at 5:12 am
kid bitzer
nietzsche says that? that’s theognis, or anonymous.
dude just *could* not break off his obsession with the greeks. no wonder he kept leaving dead rabbits in their soup.
July 22, 2010 at 5:31 am
silbey
There are other ways of checking besides interrogating the student themselves. Talking to their other professors to see what their encounters with the student have been like or checking with the “Student success” people (oh, that name!) to see if there was any information on that end. None of this may be conclusive, but students who lie to gain advantage tend to have a record (“Yeah, their grandmother died in my course, too…”).
Having said that, absent something previous in my class (late work), my tendency is not to verify either, largely because of rationale three. But I’m aware that this is unfair to the other students, who did meet the deadline, who didn’t plagiarize, who didn’t get someone to write their paper for them, etc., etc..
One of the things I think teachers got locked up in thinking in this situation is that it’s a binary situation: teacher and student. It’s not. It’s really teacher and all the students. The treatment of one student has effects on all the other students, and we should recognize that.
be honest, you’ve lied to editors
I really haven’t, thanks.
July 22, 2010 at 5:51 am
JPool
I really haven’t, thanks.
Silbey is the standard against we are doomed to measure ourselves and find ourselves lacking. But it becomes so familiar that I don’t even feel bad about my inadequacy anymore. Well, not that bad.
One of the places I taught had a system for students to register major life disruptions with the Dean’s Office. This had the advantage for the student of one-stop shopping (they only had to do the tearful unfurling once) and it was with the big bosses, so it could seem more like talking to HR than a ritual of personal distrust. Of course this system was only as effective as the Dean’s office’s ability to play it’s role professionally and not to have individual Asst. Deans allow students to game the system (one colleague was cc’d on an email in which the AD assured the pleading student, in pink 16pt text, no less, that no one would ever doubt her assurance that her plagarism was purely unintentional).
Absent this kind of administrative intermediary, I tend to use NM’s general credulousness apporach, along with judiciously distributed second chances even for those without personal tragedies.
July 22, 2010 at 6:04 am
Jonathan Jarrett
A very similar discussion is currently ongoing at Tenured Radical, and my comment there picks up on the last one here about institutional reporting, which is, it’s a grand idea but only as long as the reporting makes it down the chain. Where I last taught, it didn’t.
July 22, 2010 at 7:00 am
silbey
Silbey is the standard against we are doomed to measure ourselves and find ourselves lacking
I actually have that on my CV.
July 22, 2010 at 8:08 am
NM
I really haven’t,
This is one of those cases where I’m not sure whether it’s better to be lying or telling the truth.
thanks.
Any time, big guy.
July 22, 2010 at 8:28 am
silbey
This is one of those cases where I’m not sure whether it’s better to be lying or telling the truth.
Telling the truth, I think.
I’m not particularly trying to hold myself up as a paragon of some sort, and I’ve surely missed a fair amount of deadlines, but I haven’t felt in those situations the necessity to come up with some sort of cover story.
I don’t find the rhetorical strategy of “come on, everyone does [insert bad thing]! Confess!” to be really useful, which is why I pushed back on it.
July 22, 2010 at 8:39 am
kid bitzer
“I don’t find the rhetorical strategy of “come on, everyone does [insert bad thing]! Confess!” to be really useful”
well, it’s useful in that it tells you where the speaker draws the line between socially acceptable white lies and lies that demonstrate shameful vice.
i, for instance, have certainly lied to editors in the following way:
“i am grateful for the comments that you sent in your last.”
that was a lie, on those occasions on which i was not in fact grateful for them. it was also, in my view, a socially acceptable white lie–as you might infer from the very fact that i own up to it in public.
so, now you know something about where i draw the line, and something about where neddy draws the line, and maybe someday that knowledge will be useful!
(full confession: i have sometime appeared in volumes that i edited. when i have edited myself, i have also engaged in self-deception, sometimes quite massive, on a host of issues. so that’s an instance in which i have lied to my editor about very serious matters–matters whose seriousness you can infer from the fact that i will *not* say more about them. come on–everyone does self-deceit! confess!)
July 22, 2010 at 10:18 am
NM
Telling the truth, I think.
Wrong! The right answer is “lying”! No, the real point of course is that in professional academic life people miss deadlines all the goddamned time with usually minimal consequences. Because of this, I find it to be completely fucking dildos to be extremely strict about deadlines in classes.
I’m aware that this is unfair to the other students
All these policies are public, as I note in the post.
July 22, 2010 at 10:33 am
dana
The post by TR linked upthread is very good, especially for the reminder that sometimes it’s the students who really need help who are most loath to ask for it.
July 22, 2010 at 11:23 am
silbey
No, the real point of course is that in professional academic life people miss deadlines all the goddamned time with usually minimal consequences.
Sure. They don’t lie about why they missed them all the time, though, which was your original claim.
Because of this, I find it to be completely fucking dildos to be extremely strict about deadlines in classes
I thought the conversation was about lying as to why someone missed their deadlines. We can shift to how strictly to enforce deadlines, if you’d like.
July 22, 2010 at 11:24 am
rosmar
In professional ACADEMIC life people miss deadlines all the time with minimal consequences, but a) most of our students aren’t going to be academics, and there are a shitload of jobs in which deadlines actually are crucial, and b) even in academia there are times when meeting deadlines can make the difference between having a job or not (as a colleague discovered when she didn’t finish her dissertation by the deadline) and having money or not (many grant proposals are simply not accepted if they aren’t in on time–actually, same with many conference proposals).
Since my students have told me that they see extra time as an advantage, I am strict about deadlines. I put in my syllabus that each student gets up to one small exception to the “no late assignments” rule, and I get to define what a “small exception” means. I’m trying to balance helping them develop good habits (when I used to take late papers, those who turned them in late didn’t do any better, and had more days of stress, so it wasn’t good for them either–many students told me this) and accepting that this is a learning environment.
I always believe my students unless they give me reason not to. Like Neddy, I tell them that up front, too.
July 22, 2010 at 12:04 pm
NM
I thought the conversation was about
It can be both! Especially when the issue is a policy about accepting at face value claims that are reasonably likely to be false in order to soften deadlines.
July 22, 2010 at 12:09 pm
NM
Oh, speaking of, Dan Ariely did a neat experiment where different sections of a course were given one of three deadline standards:
(a) deadlines assigned on the syllabus, arranged evenly throughout the semester;
(b) deadlines chosen by individual students during the first week of class, unrevisable after that;
(c) no deadlines but this: all the work due by the end of the semester.
In course performance, a>b>c, and the difference between a and b was almost entirely explained by students in b setting all their deadlines at the very end of the semester, i.e., de facto getting into c.
July 22, 2010 at 1:34 pm
silbey
It can be both
Not when changing the topic of conversation is being used to avoid a counterargument.
July 22, 2010 at 2:09 pm
NM
being used to avoid a counterargument
Let me see if I understand where we are in the dialectic, my excellent friend, so we might continue on a straight path. I say that we’ve all lied (in the form of lame excuses) to editors, presses, etc. You said that you have not.* At this point I become confused about the conversation. At 8:08 I tease you a bit along the lines of “how awful for you if this is true!” At 8:28 you resist the jest. At 10:18 I broaden the topic by suggesting a rationale for regarding “my grandmother died” as similar to “I’m almost done with my report on that submission!” i.e., as a fairly innocuous lie that might even count as a degenerate case akin to “no, your ass is not fat,” that is, not a genuine assertion. At 11:23 you return to the claim that not everyone has lied about why they miss deadlines. Is this an accurate overview?
*interesting linguistic observation: terms like “everyone” don’t always function as universal quantifiers, e.g. the following seems licit– “everyone in town was asleep. Tom sat at his desk, obsessively hating minorities.”
July 22, 2010 at 2:11 pm
NM
I apologize– the point about 10:18 is that deadlines are commonly missed; in my experience they are missed with token efforts at lying. Furthermore I claim that these token efforts are commonplace. This, I think, is a rationale for accepting student excuses, but that wasn’t part of the original comment.
July 22, 2010 at 3:34 pm
silbey
At 8:28 you resist the jest. At 10:18 I broaden the topic by suggesting a rationale for regarding “my grandmother died” as similar to “I’m almost done with my report on that submission!”
And herein is the missed step. You asserted that everyone lied as part of their professional experience. I pushed back on that. You didn’t back away from the assertion as far as I know, but instead changed the subject, or broadened it, if you prefer.
in my experience they are missed with token efforts at lying. Furthermore I claim that these token efforts are commonplace.
That has not been my experience, and I would disagree (and have been disagreeing) with your claim.
July 22, 2010 at 3:38 pm
NM
Yes! Agreed. I will update the post accordingly.
July 22, 2010 at 6:46 pm
JPool
My goddess, that Tenured Radical post is great. In defense of my academic life stage, I would say that while there is some snarky celebration of the semi-annual great grandmother massacre, there is, at least among folks I know, a simultaneous acknowledgement that folks really do sometimes lose multiple family members in the course of an academic year, and hooboy, that surely sucks. At the same time, I think younger scholars, like m’self, are particularly vulnerable to allowing that feeling of insecurity and possibly being scammed to give way to a defensive antagonism. (Next up, is aggressive pursuit of plagarists a defense of academic standards or an indulgence in the use of the limited power one has available?)
On lying, the question of what constitutes a lie and when it’s socially appropriate to lie are, yes, something of side issues (though I would say that a lot of reasonable lying in the adult world is not so much about sparing people’s feelings as avoiding unneccessary and pointless arguements with people about their unreasonable expectactions). As a general rule, I have no problem endorsing the position that honesty is better than convenient dissembling, even though I have indulged in the latter more that I should have (sometimes with no consequences, occaissionally with horrible consequences) and will no doubt do so in the future. This doesn’t make me believe that students’ lies are no big deal, it just makes it easier (and I think this was part of Neddy’s point) for me to forgive them, much as I would hope to be forgiven.
July 22, 2010 at 8:28 pm
NM
a defensive antagonism.
This is a good point, JPool. I certainly used to be much more aggressive about enforcement, but with more professional confidence came a more relaxed attitude about schedules, at least. Plagiarism is different, of course, but I suppose I don’t take it as personally.
July 23, 2010 at 12:17 am
Dave
A deadline that you can miss with no [or trivial] consequences isn’t actually a deadline, it’s just a suggestion. Grant-awarding bodies, the IRS, job-adverts; things like that have deadlines you CAN’T miss. Deadlines for completion of student work need to be like that, or else there would be no end to the sliding, and those guys have another semester’s work to get to.
My institution’s policy is that nobody gets to slide on an assessment deadline – the work is late, it’s late. You have a good excuse, at the end of the semester there’s a committee which will read it, and decide if the work gets credit or not. The system works.
July 23, 2010 at 3:18 am
Jonathan Jarrett
Again, last place I taught had a policy on that and this one was actually quite good. Extensions only arrangeable via the Senior Tutor, which means that it’s not easy to beg one as there are only certain hours it’s possible; with no extension, the essay is stamped by the receiving office and that date is final. Five marks off per day it’s late, down to the pass-fail margin but no further. So if you hand in a good essay five working days late, it would have to be really excellent to get more just than a pass mark. This tends to deter the “I’ll hang on to it because it’s not good enough yet” brigade, but it also means that if you did enough work to pass, you still get the pass mark, whereas someone who didn’t hand in at all gets nothing.
The edge case of course is someone who doesn’t care enough to do good work but can easily scrape a pass, and who hands in a month late to avoid the zero fail and just gets forties throughout and never ever does anything on time. These people’s work may turn up very late indeed because beyond a certain point there is no further disincentive.
July 23, 2010 at 4:28 am
Dave
Well, those kind of people are easily covered – no hand-in by end-of-semester – fail that course/unit/module. Fail X% of modules – have to retake the year. Fail a retake year – bye-bye…
Anyone who’s prepared to negotiate the fine line between always being late and never failing outright, and wants to graduate with an average a hairsbreadth above the technical pass-mark, well, you have to admire their dedication, because that’s not an easy thing to pull off, considering how self-destructive it is in the long term.
July 23, 2010 at 5:57 am
silbey
Update I: Silbey has not lied. Diogenes, snuff out thy lamp.
You know, I find it fascinating that honesty is worthy of sarcasm, and lying is assumed to be the gritty reality.
July 23, 2010 at 6:45 am
kid bitzer
yeah, i gotta say neddy, that string of updates strikes me as prickish.
you evidently think silbey priggish. even if i agreed with that, i’d still rather be voiced than plosive.
July 23, 2010 at 8:31 am
Neddy Merrill
I take that point. I delete and apologize. I meant it as gentle fun, but if it prompts that reaction from both of you, I take that as good evidence I missed the mark.
July 23, 2010 at 8:39 am
kid bitzer
vocal tone, inflection, facial expression–that’s why humor on the net is basically impossible. i don’t even try anymore.
July 23, 2010 at 8:59 am
Neddy Merrill
You do indeed make it look effortless.
July 23, 2010 at 11:02 am
ben
terms like “everyone” don’t always function as universal quantifiers
I would be extremely surprised to learn that they function as universal quantifiers more than 10% of the time.
July 23, 2010 at 11:50 am
NM
Do you know of any work on this, Ben? It would be interesting to find out.
July 23, 2010 at 2:49 pm
ben
Absolutely none, though it also occurred to me that this is also licit: “come on, everyone knows that p!”, said to a p-denier. Put the question to the Language Log people.
Of course it is open to the vulgar* Gricean to say that even here and in your example “everyone” really does literally function in a universally quantified way, but that would be silly.
* but then, aren’t they all.
July 23, 2010 at 2:53 pm
NM
I agree, that would be silly.
July 24, 2010 at 12:11 pm
Andrew Breitbart
I have video of Silbey lying.