There can be no doubt that it's been a weird, stressful past year and past semester, though the accumulated stress and weirdness is hard to measure.
But I have an online class with 15 students, and I just emailed 6 of them with a friendly nudge to submit an assignment worth 75 points that involves minimal technology (a video of an under-five minute presentation) and a quick PowerPoint. I gave them until Friday to do this, despite the fact that the assignment was due last Sunday and despite the fact that the final exam was yesterday (and all but one of them completed that).
Maybe 40 percent of a class having some sort of trouble with a deadline or with technology or whatever the problem is should not be considered unusual, but I've been teaching the class for a decade and I've never seen anything like it.
You don't have to be a math major to grasp that taking a zero on a 75-point assignment in a course that offers a total of 825 points can drop your grade by as much as a full letter. I also know grades aren't everything and some students may be fine with a C rather than a B. As much of America likes to chant, "Freedom!"
But I also know that many college students consider any mark under an A to be a failure. Such a failure, BTW, may be blamed on the instructor -- and I'm sure good argument can be made to that end. But not submitting assignments? There's no subjectivity in grading in that case.
There will come a time when researchers have enough time, perspective, and data to provide us with a clearer picture of how the plague affected students at all grade levels. That time is years away.
But my anecdotal evidence is clear right now: college students are struggling more than ever.
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