Ever since I was a kid, procrastination has been an awful habit of mine. Whether its waiting until the last minute on an assignment or turning it in well after the deadline, I’ve done it all. So for this weeks observation, I decided to look outside the classroom to see if any of my fellow classmates share my love for procrastination based on their posting times for the course blog. Because the “responders” often comment on posts, it was difficult to track their posting times. Thus, I only looked at the posting times for the “readers” the past 4 weeks and the “observers” the past 3 weeks (my group not included). According to our syllabus, the due time for the readers is 10pm on Monday before class and the due time for the observers is 5pm on Friday. The posts fall into 5 categories: 12+ hours before the deadline, 12-7 hours before, 6-4 hours before, 3-0 hours before, and past the deadline. The data is as follows:
According to this data, it can be assumed that the Reader groups share my addiction to pushing assignments off, as a majority of the groups posted between 3-0 hours before the deadline. The Observers however, seem to favor posting past the 5pm deadline. This could be due to the fact that the assignment is due on Friday afternoon and the weekend is an inevitable force drawing students away from work. Nonetheless, it was interesting to learn how the posting times differed between the Readers and the Observers over the past few weeks.
This is actually useful data to have! It suggests that if I want to read blog posts before I go to bed on Monday night, I need to make them due earlier in the evening!
It’d be interesting to look at submission timestamps for other assignments too. And maybe even do a cross-course check. You could ask questions such as, do Math assignments tend to be handed in earlier than English assignments? Do upper level lab reports get done sooner than introductory level lab reports?