It is a common policy with math teachers that students are allowed one day of grace if they neglect their homework. The policy allows students to have an extra night either to do their homework, or fix any issues they had before.

While this is great when there is a Thursday night football game or a student is going through a hardship, students sometimes take advantage of it.

                Students who neglect their homework usually have a record of doing so. When teachers allow those students that extra day to finish the work they didn’t do, it proves to be unfair to the students who actually stayed up late and did that work.

                It used to be that when students turned in work late, they were deducted points off their overall grade. Now with the day of grace policy, some students won’t do their work, knowing it won’t count against them. This leads to the issue of copying and cheating on homework.

When students copy and cheat on their homework and use that day of grace every single time, their test scores are consequently lower. When test scores are lower, more students are likely to fail.

A small part of students see the day of grace as a way of just avoiding homework, but the more they procrastinate the more it hurts their grade. Just abusing the day of grace is going to cause them to possibly fail, because when the homework isn’t done the concept is usually not very well understood.

An easy and simple solution to the day of grace issue is to limit the number of days a six-weeks students are allowed to use the day of grace. Once students have exhausted those days, they are no longer able to use the day of grace until the six-weeks starts over. The day of grace is great sometimes, but when it’s abused it can be detrimental to the students using it.