“I called my class, because my students will need to be ready to speak right away as lawyers.”
In my job as an intellectual engineer, statements like these are as predictable as rush hour traffic on a Wednesday afternoon. It’s not just cold calling, and it’s not just legal genius. I meet interdisciplinary instructors who reject increased assignments, reassignments, and substandard assessments in the name of aligning their classrooms with the kinds of unforgiving professional environments their students will inevitably need to navigate.
I realize that this is not just the personal preference of a few teachers—this trend in teaching seems to hold a great deal of intelligence. This task-oriented approach to the classroom is filled with thoughts about what students need to succeed as professionals and the types of skills that skills should teach. But do these ideas still exist? Does this method actually cultivate keeping up with the times and technology?
Career readiness has long been a key goal of universities, and there are strong arguments for why it should remain so. But are there times when workplace conditions interfere with student learning? What do students learn when teachers punish them for “useless” behavior? And how do we account for the unequal trade of agency, inclusion and “fairness” skills?
How We Got Here
I can imagine some students experiencing whiplash from their professors after several semesters of institutional change during the violence of COVID-19, where no-failure policies, waiving of fines for late work and access to class recordings became the norm. The challenges many teachers face during this time—from burnout to questions about fairness—are also well documented. I think it’s safe to say that some teachers were eager to get back to “business as usual,” whether it’s because of their concern about declining academic rigor or a desire to protect their bandwidth.
However, behind the drive to return to “business as usual” are common misconceptions about the behaviors that many educators consider critical to student success. Taking assignment submission policies as one example, there is no evidence to support the popular assumption that pulling points on late assignments helps students become punctual professionals after graduation, and limited evidence to suggest that chronic tardiness worsens students’ academic performance.
In fact, a 2025 study involving 273 online psychology students and a non-penalty extension policy found that “late submitters did not do worse than early/on-time peers on any test, and more than 75 percent received passing grades.” Additionally, research suggests that technological interventions such as push notification reminders about important deadlines and instructional adjustments, such as clarifying assignment expectations, explaining why deadlines are set and making an effort to align deadlines with students’ schedules, are effective in encouraging punctuality without stress and loss of learning caused by hard deadlines.
In adopting a more punitive approach, some faculty seem to view a student’s inability to meet deadlines as a character flaw, or as a technical failure—even as they fail to train that critical eye toward the many unrealistic expectations students are subjected to and expected to perform on the job. We throw up our hands and say, “Life is hard and deadlines don’t go anywhere!” it doesn’t help if your goal is to develop high levels of skill development in your studies. And such an idea is guided by a few problematic assumptions.
Assumption No. 1: ‘Some Deadlines Are Non-Negotiable’
This is not true in many fields. For example, postponing a product launch and asking for a deadline extension are not as controversial in business settings as many might think, as asking the court to add or reschedule a client interview is more common in the legal field than some legal framework wants to admit. Yes, some high-level deadlines are unavoidable, but this idea of ”getting students ready” for performance pressures by raising the stakes for planning in all our coursework is a false equivalency; we cause more stress and give them less time to focus on the skills most important to their job readiness.
Assumption No. 2: ‘Work Can’t Change, So Students Need To Change It’
When we lock our students into the rules of the corporate office, we show them that the workplaces they will enter will not and should not change. How does such a message read to a student who sees alarming levels of alcohol use problems among lawyers or teacher burnout? Why promote these working conditions in the classroom when we know their negative consequences? I saw how this grind culture routine could prevent students from pursuing certain fields. Instead of removing students, we should be empowering them to become leaders who create cultural and policy changes that support employee well-being.
Assumption No. 3: ‘Work Readiness Is the Most Important Thing’
Not all students take classes to prepare for a professional role. And even if they do, there are important lessons and experiences they might miss out on with such a focus. If the instructor of my junior Acting I class had auditioned for the roles we played, kicked us out of productions for being late to class and deducted points for fumbling a line, I personally would have missed out on critical lessons I learned about empathy, persistence and eloquence, all skills I use in and outside of my work today.
Where School and Work Should Meet
Yes, there is a time and a place for career preparation at the college level. There is clear value in embedding clinical exchanges, business training and educational processes in the curriculum. I support guest speakers, alumni panels and workplace visits so students can learn directly from experts. I’m all about job hunting, client-based projects and case-based jobs where students take on professional roles. The importance of this engagement, I think, is to provide students with practical, person-centered practice in solving ethical, ideological, organizational, creative and artistic challenges in their fields. In educational contexts, these important things should come in addition to the established times.
Being flexible as an instructor can be challenging, but it is possible, and instructors can choose from a wide variety of flexible deadline policies, whether they teach large or small classes. Let’s not let the desire to turn our classrooms into workshops—whether for the sake of convenience or the illusion of doing so—get in the way of our highest responsibility: to make learning happen.
