Students Taking Advantage of The VIRUS!

[backatit]

I am outing myself somewhat, but I do live in hurricane alley, and have faced this situation over the course of several years (we have been hit, and hit hard, several years' past, and have had to accommodate students who lost power, lost their homes, and had significant disruption due to storms).

Our university has been good in providing direction for this, including directing us to be flexible with due dates and excused absences (I have an extremely flexible fall syllabus, where I can throw my due dates around at a moments notice, depending on when the hurricane happens to hit, not if). So I'm doing close to the same thing for this. I've only had one student I felt was taking the mick bit about this (an extremely detailed excuse for absences that had apparently started back in January). Institutional flexibility helps, but the idea is that we flex, and are crystal clear about the new due dates, to try to avoid confusion, and I think that helps.

I have a calendar with the old, then the new due dates in bold, and I email that to them (email usually works when they can't download things as it takes less bandwidth). There have been times, though, when we've had parts of semesters canceled. I taught one semester when we lost our house mid-semester, ran our modem off a generator, then found temporary housing after about 6 weeks of living and teaching on the porch, and that was brutal.

[Aster]

Today, a student asked for a copy of the answer keys to one of our lab manuals.
Fail.

Then he said that his online tutors were having trouble "looking up the answers on the internet."
Double Fail.