Urgent advice wanted - dd at uni about to hand in essays late and lose 5 marks for each - should she speak to tutor?

[Mumofunibaby]

Just that. My dd is in her 2nd year at uni and had 3 essays due together (2 yesterday, one today). She got in a right state and handed in 1 essay a few hours late yesterday, the second she is just finishing now (was also due by 2pm yesterday) and as a result, the third essay due today will also now be a few hours late.

The problem is that her uni deducts 5 marks per 24 hours an essay is late. So she is likely to lose 3 x 5 marks in total. Which is a lot. And a real shame as she just scraped a first in her first year grades, but could end up with a 2.2 in her final degree now.

She is dyslexic but hasn't registered as such at uni, partly because she struggled to organise a dyslexia assessment during lockdown.

Could anyone with recent uni experience or who is a tutor please advise - is it worth her contacting her personal or subject tutors to ask for some leniency? She says there is no point as they won't give any and stress you lose 5 marks if your essay is 1 minute late, let alone a few hours. But that does seem really harsh, as it's basically because they've all come at once so being late with the first one has had a domino effect on all the others.

She is very stressed and has been in floods of tears about this.

All suggestions appreciated. Thank you!

Dyslexia isn’t about struggling with words and numeracy. It’s a disorder of information processing, and this includes time management. It impacts short term memory which causes problems when drafting essays.

Your daughter should urgently contact student support as she is entitled to support for this, and it’s possible they have coaches to help with time management. I also recommend she gets in touch with the British Dyslexia Association for an assessment. They will be able to highlight key functional areas and strategies for working with these. There’s software available that might help and they’ll be able to advise on this. Student support might be able to assist in arranging the assessment and help her with tracking it.

Good luck x

If they have been worked and reworked then she can hand in what she has. If it's a question of perfecting them she needs to learn to prioritise DONE over perfect. This is what deadlines are for. It can be difficult to do. I do suggest she contact student services to see if she can access any study support or time management support or indeed some form of relaxation support if she is overwhelmed

Life has changed so much since I was at university.
My very lovely parents cast me off with a wave and the instructions to have fun and do my best.

They never knew anything about the course requirements or even whether I had an assignment to complete.

I failed a couple of exams but it didn’t occur to me to tell them.

I can’t help but think that’s the way it should be.

Learning support or whatever it is they are called at her university will help her to address specific difficulties she is experiencing. An official diagnosis of dyslexia will help but strategies and recommendations are specific to the individual.

So within overall time management she should probably be setting herself earlier deadlines... breaking down her work into smaller timetabled goals that she sticks to, and committing to complete a piece of work perhaps 36 hours before official submission. This will ensure she does not experience these last minute panics.

It sounds like she is really over-writing her work too. Of course some reductions and condensing of work is inevitable but if she is writing 15,000 words for eg a 3000 word piece of work something has gone very wrong. She should be working closely to the set guidelines, ensuring she covers each requirement and has worked out allocation of words for sections according to marks given. She should be attempting to stick with word count roughly as she goes along rather than leave a mammoth task of reducing a piece to 20 or 30 % of what she has written out.

It sounds like she, like many students, should bear in mind that saying "Don't let perfect be the enemy of good"

My daughter is similar to this - ended up realising herself she has ADD - females can mask it. It took a job to convince her high school to even complete the forms! But they did and she has a formal diagnosis now. Maybe worth googling inattentive ADHD and see if this applies to her.

I'm an ex SpLD tutor who worked in HE. I was also diagnosed as dyslexic whilst at uni but actually have ADHD.

I trained to be a dyslexia assessor - the post-graduate course was basic and hardly covered anything on other SpLDs, hence, why my ADHD diagnosis came years later.

If your daughter struggles to actually get things done, it takes a very short deadline to spur her into action, she struggles with her emotions and her essays go off at a tangent she is displaying many of the classic signs of ADHD. She may also have dyslexia or this may be a mis-diagnosis.

The form for support through the Disabled Students Allowances is short and she'll be able to sit with someone in the disability team to help her fill this in if she needs this support to actually motivate her to get this done. Through the DSA she can access a 1:1 study skills tutor and use this as a motivator to get on with her work.

If she does have ADHD, although the strategies I taught as a study skills tutor help to a degree, I've needed medication to get on top of the challenges I face.

A lot of women with ADHD feel they have to be perfectionists to compensate for the challenges they have so it isn't unusual for these students to get a first in many of their essays.

It certainly doesn't sound like the issue is bad planning or laziness, it's perfectionism and an inability to just accept that something is 'good enough'.
I can almost guarantee that if she has been working on these for weeks, and was only a few hours late with them in the end, she could have submitted whatever she had done at the deadline and wouldn't have lost the amount of marks she will be penalised for late submission.
I see students so often agonising over things that will make a difference of 1 mark and it's really not worth it.
Though on the bright side, my Uni deducts 10 marks for every 24 hours it's late so it could be worse for her!
I'd also be very surprised if losing 15 marks total will make any difference to her overall grade. Even if those 3 essays are 100% of her 2nd year mark (unlikely, but if they are she should give some strong feedback to her department about how badly they have staggered those assessments), usually the 2nd year contributes a lot less to the final degree classification than the final year does.
I don't think it will harm her to submit an extension request, even after the event. At our Uni at the moment we are being very generous in regards to extensions because having mainly online learning has been disruptive for everyone.

@Mumofunibaby

Many thanks for all the helpful comments.

Just to add that I do think there are (or can be) links between dyslexia and organisational skills. I think the assumptions that because she's dyslexic there is no connection to her time management skills is not necessarily correct. Obviously, not everyone who is dyslexic automatically struggles with time management. But I think there can be a connection?

But yes, this is something she'll need to follow up with student support etc going forwards.

There's a HUGE connection between dyslexia and time management! I don't know how/why anyone would question this?!

I too handled uni on my own without any parental intervention including sorting everything out for a year abroad. But there was more leniency there in some respects. I was quite often late with an essay and there was never any question that we would be penalised - we used to just leave a note under our tutors' doors saying sorry. I too used to write far too much and struggle to cut it down - that was what made me late. So my time management wasn't fabulous. I have had no difficulties at all in the workplace in the last thirty years.

Could anyone with recent uni experience or who is a tutor please advise - is it worth her contacting her personal or subject tutors to ask for some leniency? She says there is no point as they won't give any and stress you lose 5 marks if your essay is 1 minute late, let alone a few hours. But that does seem really harsh, as it's basically because they've all come at once so being late with the first one has had a domino effect on all the others.

She should contact her personal tutor to get help for starting to have her dyslexia assessed.

But she's known about the deadlines & penalties presumably since September/October ie the start of term. She should have managed her time in relation to the work required and the deadlines. No sympathy there, I"m afraid. It's a hard lesson, but it needs to be learnt.

It's always the case that the deadline is the deadline unless there's a good reason - sudden emergency/illness. Undiagnosed dyslexia is nt a good reason, nor is pressure of other work.

It's not fair on other students - nor us staff who plan our workloads around tight marking deadlines. If you have 100 essays coming in in dribs and drabs, but your university requires these to be marked, second marked, all the feedback finalised & uploaded, and the admin processes gone through, all within 3 weeks, we have to plan ! and then not sleep very much

The other thing she could do is see if her Student Counselling/Welfare services has any self-coaching material on time management and procrastination. My place does & it's excellent (I use some of the techniques myself!)

Maybe she'll see the reason that we need to have official recognition of disabilities such as dyslexia. If she organises her assessment, she'll also have a package of support - depending on how extreme her disability is. At my place, for severe learning disabilities, there is access to technology, laptops, one to one specialised support, for example. At the mild end, there's the reassurance that there is always a week's extension on application.

Help her to get the work in and to organise a disability assessment. It'll help her to make sure the rest of her degree runs a bit more smoothly, hopefully.

Priorities for DD

Priority 1. Essays in.

Priority 2. Sort out help for dyslexia

Priority 3. Use personal tutor, keep in touch with them. All too often they can be hard to find/elusive.

Your priorities etc.
Be supportive - from a distance. It’s all too easy to wade in and take over.
Uni are unlikely to talk to you - especially about specifics - and rightly so.
Look for help etc on uni’s web pages. Fresh eyes can spot something that may be hiding in plain sight.
Is DD in a large uni town/city? There is often non uni help available in places like Leeds/Manchester, less so in St Davids.
If mh/stress issues emerge then consider suggesting doing one year if uni over 2 actual years.

All the best.

So, we cannot tell you what your daughter's institution will allow, All of the rules relating to extensions/mitigation will be on the website of the university and student support will be able to help her navigate that.

In general, at least at my institution, the module leaders are not responsible for extensions, and don't make up the rules so there's no point going back to the person setting the essay unless they have that power. She really needs, I can't emphasise this enough, to find out the rules and the people who process these at her institution.

It's the same for dyslexia- at our institution she could self-refer herself to the Disability/Accessability services and then get an assessment through that (or find out what they would accept as an assessment.) Again, this is likely to be online and all set out; she should absolutely prioritize this in the next few weeks and it may be that some dyslexia assessment criteria can be retroactively applied (they would be at my institution) e.g. if the student had been unfairly penalised for spelling when they were dyslexic.

I don't know what can be done right now because we don't know the institution's rules- she needs to be poring over the website information, phoning or visiting student support and finding out the facts of what is possible.

We issue extensions if they are put in on the day of the deadline, but only for one week, longer ones would require more evidence. But that doesn't tell you what happens at hers- she needs to be doing this urgently.

I know she should help herself but I would assist her with finding this information this time around, and also setting up a dyslexia assessment, whilst she is in this panic, and then over time she can learn to manage this stuff herself.

Dyslexia absolutely does impact on processing times which impacts time management, but she needs to get the official docs in place very urgently so all her next set of assessments will be marked in line with this.

I would get an ADHD assessment for her and encourage her to talk to the disability unit at the university.

All the best.

But she clearly struggles with time management, and I don't know whether that's related to her dyslexia, or to stress or what...

Yes it is, as PP have said.

Perfectionism (I could rant about this in students and myself and my colleagues for hours ...) I speak from my own experience here otherwise why am I posting on MN on my lunchbreak?

It's a very useful smokescreen for a lot of other things. It can look very virtuous but it is a form of self-sabotage. It can also be a form of procrastination.

It is far far better to acknowledge that we can never be perfect.

Essays are a form of demonstrating your learning and your thinking. They're never ever an indication of your value as a human being. But too often young people - particularly young women - see their assessment grades as a summary of their worth. It is so sad.

Too often - particularly young women - are being pushed by our secondary education system to see anything other than "top marks" to be a "failure".

So she might need to readjust her catastrophic thinking, for example, if this is what she's indulging in. It won't help her produce her best work. Fear won't help.

She needs to think about her learning and her thinking - not her marks. This is something she could talk to her tutor about - I love it when students come to me with some ideas for their essay, before they write it, rather than afterwards to ask me why they "didn't get a First." We can have a proper discussion of their ideas and their thinking processes - which is, after all, what they're at university to learn & develop.

Finally, what is at stake for her in getting a First? If you set aside the erroneous/distorted view that a mark or a grade is about your value or worth as a human being, then why does it matter?

Unless she wants to go on to further academic study, such as a PhD, it really doesn't matter. And even then, the number of people I know who are highly successful academic, who didn't graduate with First Class degrees ... well, I'm one of them, and I'm a very successful academic.

So there's lots of really positive life learning she could draw from this experience.

Maybe try to help her reframe this as a learning moment, not a failure.

“But it is poor time management — the effect (missed deadlines leading to marks being docked) is the same whether the person didn’t start the essay till too late out of laziness or because their perfectionism meant they kept revising it multiple times and missed the deadline. It’s still late.

And learning to manage your own time to get something as good as you can make it within the time constraints is an important life skill.”

I wouldn’t dispute any of this, I just take issue with some of the smugness that I see on threads like this. And the implication that this is some kind of moral failing. Some people seem to have innate ability when it comes to organisation, some people have to work at it a lot, some people are chronically bad at it and might always struggle. Sometimes it is a symptom of something else (in this case dyslexia). No need to say ‘this is why students get a bad rep!’ or similar- it’s not an issue limited to students, for one thing.

I'm a lecturer and tutor. It's worth her being in touch with her module leads and just sending an apologetic email and explaining the situation. Realistically, it's a bit of a live and learn situation. It probably won't change anything (I'd not be able to make an exception if a student was late), but it will reflect positively on her nonetheless.

Really, I would expect students to get themselves together enough to ask for an extension or to arrange for extenuating circumstances. Especially as it's term 2 now. But I know it's hard times for everyone.

Really the thing I appreciate most from students is just being upfront and honest about their situation and taking responsibility for it. Students often come to me without all sorts of bizarre explanations for why they submitted something late or whatever, but it really makes a difference when someone doesn't try to make excuses and I'm generally more inclined to give them a break where I can.

The tutors will look poorly in her for not contacting them sooner when she realised she was having trouble hitting deadlines. My DC who has severe dyslexia among a host of other disabilities and associated issues doesn’t get extensions but stuff is in place to support through the course. When she was hospitalised and needed extensions she had to follow procedure and fill in the forms just like anyone else even when it was obvious that being hospitalised for that particular illness would make it obvious she needed extra time to complete set work.
Yes poor organisation is a trait of dyslexia but accepting that and putting in strategies to mitigate is part of being mature enough to work with a diagnosis and accept it. Sorry to be so harsh but if your DD got this far without much additional support then it sounds like an excuse and does very little for those for whom it is a serious impairment to be given the consideration they need to actually participate in higher education

Exlecturer here. OP, it shouldn't mean she gets a 2:2 now unless she only has these summative essays for the whole of her degree (and even then it probably wouldn't). She'll have probably 6-12 modules that count towards her degree, and her final degree classification will be an average of the marks she receives for summative assessment throughout the second and third year (possibly weighted 40:60 or similar). So just as a simplified example, say she has 12 summative essays over 2 years and is carrying a 73% average, but loses 5 marks for 3 of them, that would only drag her down to 71% and she'd still get a 1st. She'd had to really blow it to get a 2:2 if she's hovering on a 1st at the moment. The boundary for a 2:2 is an average of under 60%.

dyslexia is often co morbid with adhd - and adhd is often misunderstood and overlooked in girls. The time management sets off the adhd alarm for me - not trying to diagnose her over the internet, but definitely worth looking into. Diagnosis and understanding changed my dd's life

She is dyslexic but hasn't registered as such at uni, partly because she struggled to organise a dyslexia assessment during lockdown.“

This is a shame. She should at least have contacted her tutor.

She should do so at once now. Even if it proves to be too late. If this had all been registered before as a PEC she definitely would have been given a time extension.
She must at least try.

Uni tutor here. Yes - she should absolutely speak to her tutor. It may be possible to apply retrospectively for an extension. At the university I work at, this is possible for some types of assignment. Our attitude is to be lenient to students who are generally engaging well, and we do not currently require medical evidence for short extensions (to avoid over-burdening health services during covid).

Also, the tutor will be able to work with her to sort out some more robust systems for organising essays and getting the extra time and consideration she is entitled to.

In the university I work at, the tutor is automatically notified if more than a certain number of credits of coursework is submitted late. So the tutor might be in touch anyway.

Good luck!

OP, I just want to offer some reassurance that this probably isn't as catastrophic as you think. Mine and all my friends uni's worked in the way i'm about the describe so i'm sorry if it's incorrect but please know its coming from a place of reassurance.

For each essay that is late the is a 5% penalty.

Given your DD is in second year I can't imagine she has any modules worth more than 20 credits. Therefore even if each of these essays is worth 100% of a 20 credit module (which i think is highly unlikely, i never had an essay worth more than 60%) then for each late essay she's only losing 1 'credit'

Ontop of that every uni i've ever known has weighted 2nd year 33% (or 33.33) and 3rd year 67% (or 66.66).

Therefore losing 3 credits maximum from the year that is much lower weighted in her final degree classification isn't going to be catastrophic.

Another way to think of it is every 20 credit module in second year is worth 5.5% of her overall degree classification. Therefore by losing 5% from a 100% essay of a 20 credit module (which, again, is assuming these essays are 100% of the module grade which is highly unlikely) she's only losing 0.275% from her overall degree classification per essay. That's 0.825% across the 3 essays. So these 3 essays being penalised by 5% each will at maximum take less than 1% off her final degree classification.

Each 5% she looses this year is worth half the amount of any 5% she may lose next year in real terms. Therefore i'd try not to stress to much and instead encourage your DD to apply for all the support she is eligible for after this as having this support in place in her final year is going to be far more important

Sorry if that is confusing, the ways degrees are calculated it very complex, but I hope it helps both your and her stress levels

If your daughter is anything like I was it's only in university she's no longer able to submit last minute. I coasted through most years of school because I was smart and could get away with juggling deadlines.

Unlike your daughter though neurodiversity support barely existed for females when I was at university and I floundered through my studies.

She has to learn to ask her school for help. There are no two ways about it.

Some of your comments sound like you are molly codling her which isn't going to help her. She's not a kid anymore. That's not saying she doesn't need help but she needs to learn to be an independent neurodiverse adult. Adult life won't get any easier for her as someone who is neurodiverse. Employment will be harder.

I am happy for students to have "family support" but by year 2 they need to start to fly solo. Which includes asking for help from at least a couple of the many different support services that universities offer - personal tutor or academic tutor or director of studies, student wellbeing or counselling services, student disability services, student union welfare officer, student union advice service, academic learning skills support. Any or all of those, or whatever else is available at her university, can either help her directly or point her in the direction of getting the help she needs. Some universities give extensions, others don't, but all have ways of helping students if students ask for help.

Your DD needs to think strategically. This is not just three missed deadlines and some lost marks. This is part of a bigger problem and really she needs to find support for her stress and her dyslexia / perfectionism / time management issues so that the rest of her degree can go more smoothly and she can get the grade she deserves. She shouldn't have to struggle this much, but she needs to stop stressing about individual courseworks and take the first steps that will allow the university to support her with both her stress and her dyslexia.

The main point that many connected with university practice have made is to get in touch with the Student Support team for Disability and Dyslexia. It's really important you don't lose more time here. They should be able to signpost and advise in terms of appropriate screening and to help with any processes to get assessed - forms, contact, timings. They will be very experienced in this, or they should be.

It is still very useful to go for a screening at undergraduate or postgraduate level (from my perspective, I was in a postgraduate workplace and out of the education system by the time an academic recommended I did this. I definitely thought 'what's the point now? How funny.' But they were right and it was important.) Interestingly, from a personal perspective, I did not struggle at school or university, and not really in exam conditions either, which was lucky. When I got to 'real' work though, boy did I feel it and it never got much better. So please go through the route with support from experienced people as it could really help improve things for later too, rather than relying on anxiously covering up issues, taking the hit (like this) and drowning, not waving.

Lastly, I would also caution that if you are 'on the books' in (say) your coursework or subject once there is a diagnosis, it does not automatically get transferred across the board to other areas even in a university and especially if the diagnosis was not in place before the place was offered - this is sad and awkward but it's a GDPR thing. So you may not automatically have whatever adjustments logged pre-exam entry as well as for normal work. Please ensure that this is prepared for about 6 months in advance, again ask the Disability and Dyslexia service how best to make sure. Take several copies of any assessment evidence on paper and be prepared to give them wherever needed.