The Cost of Precision

Precision can improve your work. It can also create more work.

A school might have a policy for students who miss school. It might say something like this:

“A student will receive one day to make up work per day missed.”

Seems simple enough. But it gets complicated when you try to apply it.

When Precision Creates More Work

If you’re on a block schedule, is it one day or one class period? Do weekends count? Does it matter whether the absences were excused or unexcused? What if the absences were due to a school-related sports event? What if there was a holiday during the absences?

In a simple situation, following this policy precisely might require a teacher to send a few emails for clarification. But a slightly more complicated scenario could send a teacher down a rabbit hole.

Some teachers might spend time in the attendance software, counting days. They might send emails or talk to people to clarify whether an absence was excused or even contest whether it should have been excused in the first place. They might have discussions about students attending sports-related events and how that impacts their grades and the class. What seemed like a straightforward policy can quickly spiral into a lot of work.

I’ve seen this scenario happen way too often and I understand where teachers are coming from.

The spirit of this policy is easy to recognize: students should not use absences to get an indefinite number of days to make up their work. Students should not take unfair advantage of their teachers.

A teacher who goes down this rabbit hole, or even down the first few steps, is trying to hold students accountable and follow the policy as precisely as possible so students don’t get more time than they’re entitled to.

But at what cost?

They may be spending far more time on precision than the situation deserves. Precision becomes a problem when it requires you to make distinctions that don't matter, and those distinctions force you to make more decisions.

In this case, if you are in the gradebook and notice that an assignment is three days late, you might mark it late or, if it’s missing, a zero. At this point, the responsibility should fall on the student, not the teacher.

You don’t need to count how many days the student was absent. You don’t need to remember if the student plays soccer and if the soccer team had to leave early. You don’t need to worry if it was Veterans Day. It’s late or missing, and you mark it as such.

Because a student’s grade has dropped, the student will then likely talk to you and remind you that they were absent. Now you can have a brief discussion. “Remind me of the details,” you might say. Ask some follow-up questions if you need to, and come to an agreement.

I am by no means saying disregard the policy. You should know if the intent is days or class periods. That is vital information to know as you talk with the student.

But beyond that, calculating the exact number of days for each situation isn’t necessary. You might say something like this: “Sounds like you were absent Thursday and Friday. Today is Monday so I probably should have the paper today because you had the weekend, but you said you were still feeling bad over the weekend. So, when should I expect this paper?”

I’ve found, using this approach, that students often suggest a date earlier than I was prepared to give them. In this example, maybe the precise day is Monday or maybe it’s Thursday. I don't need to calculate whether the student technically earned two days, three days, or four days. I need to make sure they have a reasonable deadline and that they don't have unlimited time.

Once we've agreed on a deadline, I hold them to it with precision. If they say Wednesday, then Wednesday it is.

I do recognize that there may be complicated problems for students who miss something like a lab or a major test. In both of these situations, the question you need to ask is this: How precise do I need to be?

We should also ask this question in the more mundane circumstances we encounter. Is precision needed when students ask to go to the bathroom? Do we need a spreadsheet to track frequency and duration of bathroom trips? Probably not. You might simply notice that a student has been leaving class frequently and say, “It seems like you’ve been using the bathroom a lot this month. Let’s stop that habit. Go before class.”

Another example where precision might cost you time is grading papers or projects. If a paper or project is worth 100 points, that creates 101 possible scores, but most of those distinctions aren't meaningful. What is the meaningful difference between an 83 and an 84? Can you really distinguish between those two grades?

A rubric can narrow down the possible grades. If you don't use a rubric, you can create your own limits. Instead of giving every possible score from 80 to 89, perhaps you only use three scores in that range: 80, 84, and 87, for example. This frees you from having to make tiny distinctions that aren't especially meaningful. Fewer distinctions mean fewer decisions.

It's much easier to decide whether a paper is an 80 or an 84 than it is to decide whether it's an 80, 81, 82, 83, or 84. Precision isn’t needed in this case and can consume too much mental energy. For this reason, grading assignments out of 20 or 60 points instead of 100 can be useful because it automatically cuts down the number of grades possible.

When Precision Eliminates Work

Precision doesn’t always create more work. Sometimes, precision can eliminate work. There are times when a precise rule creates less work for the teacher because it reduces the number of decisions that need to be made.

I have read books and articles on late work and late policies, and I have tried multiple policies myself. What I have found is that flexible due dates create way more work for the teacher and don’t help the student.

I have also tried precise and strict late policies, which have made it much easier for me. If the assignment is late, it receives 50% off. If it’s more than seven days late, it’s a zero. The policy is precise because the consequences are clearly defined, and it’s because I typically don't make exceptions.

Precision doesn’t have to be complicated. Late is late. There is no counting of days or calculating percentages off for each day missed.

For my students, there hasn’t been much difference between the highly flexible and the highly precise late policies. The pass rate of my class has not changed. The typical distribution of grades has not changed, and the quality of work is roughly the same. For my particular group of students, the precise policy actually helps them be more responsible because they know the expectations and work within the structure of the class.

The key point is this: precision can create extra work, but it can also eliminate work.

In the case of absences, very complicated situations are rare enough that it makes more sense to be flexible and work things out with students. Late work, however, happens often enough that a precise rule makes sense. Instead of handling each situation as a new case, I can simply follow the rule.

Precise rules are useful when they tell you what to do before you encounter the situation, but they need to be simple to follow. Precision becomes costly when it requires you to make decisions about fine distinctions that aren’t meaningful.

So when thinking about precision, we need to ask if it’s going to create more decisions or fewer, and we need to ask whether the distinctions we're making actually matter.

While distinctions between an 82 and 83 might not matter for a project, for a student's final grade, a single point might determine whether the student receives an A or an A-, which can affect their GPA and other outcomes. This distinction matters and precision is needed, just like it might be needed for lab safety protocols or an important communication with a parent or administrator.

The goal isn't to maximize precision. It's to use the appropriate amount of precision for the situation.

Precision, at its best, simplifies decisions and makes distinctions where they truly matter. At its worst, precision creates unnecessary distinctions and decisions. Precision is valuable when it creates clarity and costly when it overcomplicates trivial issues.

I think we know that being imprecise can have a cost. But we think less often about the cost of being precise.

Use the appropriate amount of precision for your given situation.

In other words, let’s be more precise in how much precision we use.