Learning from example

Deadlines. Students know the meaning of them all too well from pulling all nighters to finish a paper due at 8 a.m. or scrambling to finish this week's chemistry problem set. Professors give homework deadlines to teach students how to set goals and effectively schedule their lives. But what happens when the professor doesn't return what they ask of their students?   When a student is given a week to complete an assignment should a professor have it returned in a week?

Conceivably, when professors don't return graded homework in a timely matter it causes students to lose interest in their class. At the college level most students are naturally enthusiastic about learning, but still their professors need to inspire, challenge, and stimulate them. Whatever level of motivation your students bring to the classroom will be transformed, by what happens in the classroom. From personal experience, when students feel their instructors slacking, they begin to slack too by skipping class, not keeping up with the reading, or turning in assignments late.  

Perhaps greater than personal motivation to learn, homework provides a student a chance to review what they learn in class. It allows teachers and students alike a way to monitor progress. How is a student supposed to know how they are doing in a class when they only have one graded assignment at mid semester? We understand that five page papers may not be graded the next day and available on demand, but handed back a month later? How do these professors expect students to improve? How do they expect students to know when they've got a concept entirely wrong? That their style was awkward? That the sources they used were unreliable or were not cited properly?

When we're paying over $13,000 a year, it should be a professors moral responsibility to return homework in a timley matter. Although there is no written law that professors have deadlines, is it really that much to ask for?  If we're here to learn and get an education, it won't happen unless both ends pull their weight.