Williamson-like Critique

Throughout this class, I have greatly benefited from the soft deadlines and attendance policies; however, I also understand how there were overall cons to these practices as well. I have never been in a college course that cares so much about the stress of students and offers soft deadlines. In my opinion, these rules were very helpful in my life for personal reasons, but they were greatly appreciated. I believe that most students would have appreciated these rules at one point or another due to the hectic lives that everyone faces. However, I also understand how these rules can make it harder on the professor and result in students taking advantage of these rules.

I believe that offering soft deadlines is a very nice thing to do for students considering it makes the grading timeline more difficult for the professor. After reading some of the other student’s blog posts, I felt that the soft deadlines helped out quite a bit of the class. This rule gave students the opportunity to mitigate stress because we could complete assignments with a lenient timeline during hectic periods in our lives. However, I am also not sure if the completion rate for assignments would have been higher if the deadlines were hard. Although the soft deadlines rule allowed students some freedom and stress relief, it is also arguable that less students would have turned work in late if there was a strict turn-in policy. There were periods that many students completed assignments well after the weekend deadline, and that might have been different with hard deadlines. With all that being said, the professor of this class is the one that carried the burden of having to grade our assignments later than usual. Ultimately, the rules regarding deadlines and the professor’s understanding of struggles that students face was extremely helpful for me as a student, but I also think that stricter deadlines would make the job easier for the professor.

The rules regarding attendance were not unusual for undergraduate courses at the University of Illinois. I have had many classes that did not require attendance, but I think students took advantage of this policy in this course. I know students, including myself, benefitted from the attendance rules on days that we had interviews or exams, but I noticed that fewer students started showing up towards the second half of the semester. I saw the opposite behavior in myself because I was showing up to most class sessions during the second half of the semester. Although I had personal issues and trouble getting in my assignments on time, I found the class interesting and enjoyed participating in the discussions. There were times that I felt shy to speak up during the discussions due to the lack of students in the classroom, but I began to open up more towards the end. I think an idea that could get more faces to show in the future would be to receive extra credit points for participating and showing up for attendance. 

Overall, I believe these rules made it harder on the instructor of the course but helped students. I know that it’s easy for students to take advantage of these rules, but I think I would have been in a very different place without them. They were very helpful for me, and I appreciated how the professor actually reached out to the students instead of lowering our grade. I think these rules could use some guidelines that could help make students more committed to the course. For example, the attendance policy could offer extra credit or only allow a specific amount of absences. In addition, the soft deadlines policy could have a strict limit on the number of times it can be used in the course.