How to Finesse Any Deadline

The coronavirus pandemic has brought with it a whole new list of opportunities for buying extra time on deadlines and retaking tests. With colleges increasingly moving to online-only classes for at least the fall semester, students are left turning everything in through a glitchy learning management system (or LMS), and taking proctored exams over their home wifi. Type A, honor roll types may feel frustrated by the risk remote learning poses to their perfect transcripts, but it’s a whole new playing field for savvy slackers.

“In terms of getting out of assignments, there’s quite a few [ways],” Michael, 18, an incoming freshman at Michigan State who asked to omit his last name, told VICE. “Teachers (this is my experience from high school) don’t know a ton about technology, at least like we do. So telling any adult that ‘it just won’t go through,’ or ‘my computer wouldn’t work’ is actually usable. Saying your wifi was out works well, too.”

Francheska Guerrero, a 21-year-old student at the University of Florida, said that while she personally doesn’t turn assignments in late, she’s aware of other students who blame slow internet, or will turn in purposely corrupted files to give themselves extra time to complete the assignment. “Or they’ll turn in the wrong document and when the professor tells them afterward, they’ll send in the new one,” Guerrero said. “Especially now, professors are very sympathetic to students and the good ones try to help you out.”

Professors and TAs are certainly aware of the fibs, but because of the very real chance that a student is telling the truth, they sort of have no choice but to believe it. Just off the dome (and not to suggest lying to teachers), some creative spins on this, for when a professor inevitably gets wary of the “my wifi crashed” story, might involve something along the lines of: “All four of my roommates were gaming and the whole building’s wifi went out,” or, “[Insert your town’s universally hated internet provider, like Optimum or SuddenLink] f-ed me over again! F!”

Extremely elaborate excuses, without documentation or backup of some kind, are high risk but high reward; a true example from the past few months involves a student’s meatball falling from her meatball sub, landing on the keyboard, and closing her out of an online test prematurely, therefore causing an extremely low grade. Luckily this student happened to live-Snapchat the whole thing, sent the photos to her professor, and was able to retake the test.

A biology professor at a university in the South, who asked for his name and university affiliation to remain anonymous, said he could “write books on the subject” of elaborate student excuses. Even before the pandemic pushed almost all of his classes online, he taught online intro-level courses to large groups of students.

“The range in ‘excuses’ from students is all across the board, some legit and others just preposterous,” the professor said. Generally, he and most other professors can tell when a particular student may be lying, based on red flags they’ve dropped throughout the semester. “Students are very much creatures of habit. Many times, the very first email I get from a student is, ‘I don’t understand how to do this,’ and I’ll say, ‘Did you read the instructions?’ There’s a lot of red flags that go up that give you an idea that someone’s maybe not doing their work.”

The professor said he may ask for documentation in some cases—like if a student says they were too sick to complete an online assignment, he’ll ask for proof that they were indeed sick enough to go to the doctor (though he clarified he wouldn’t need to know what exactly they were sick with). Otherwise, he said, most professors have little to no choice but to believe a student when they blame technology—because wifi does crash, computers do go into a lengthy update at the worst possible time, and those big internet providers do often suck ass. If students want to rely on those excuses throughout fully remote semesters, they should just maybe be careful to use them sparingly, like a limited lifeline.

For students who are reading this and thinking, These lying, lazy freaks crying wolf are going to ruin it for me, when I have an actual problem that prevents me from doing coursework, the professor has a valuable and simple piece of advice: Now, more than ever, communicate with your instructors. Even if office hours only happen on Zoom, and even if you never actually see teachers in person, they understand that remote learning comes with a host of issues for most people, and the pandemic plus normal life itself sometimes cause insurmountable disruptions.

“The most important thing for students to do well in this online environment is keeping a clear line of communication and being proactive to potential issues,” the professor said. That includes things like possible wifi issues (if students know their internet is glitchy), or more personal problems, like illness or death among family or friends, or even things like a bad breakup.

“If you wait till the last second, there’s not much I can do for you. Of course it’s on a case-by-case basis. I have students who’ve gone through pretty horrible situations, and they come to me and say, ‘Listen, I’m going through some real terrible shit right now, I can’t get

my act together, what are my options?’ If you’re communicating with me, and I know it’s not an outright lie, I’ll work with you, I want you to be successful.”

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