Prof. Kristin Stephens-Martinez

I wrote a guest blog post about my late-token system for homework assignments , where students can spend tokens to submit assignments late without a grade penalty. Each token is worth one day, and students must fill out a form to use tokens. I also use their token usage to identify students who may need more check-ins. [ Also posted on Medium. ] I originally wrote about this system on this blog in 2022 . The guest post describes what I do now in 2026, while this post focuses on how you can implement a late-token system yourself. I recommend the following steps: Decide on a simple set of rules to make it easy to know who should receive a message. Create a form that auto-captures student email addresses. Figure out how you will message students. Figure out how students will know how many tokens they have left. For deciding the rules , my current system is relatively simple. 1 token = 1 day. Students get 7 days, unless I say otherwise. I also give students a 30-minute grace period, but th...

(I have an updated version of this post as a guest post on Grading for Growth and a post on this blog with implementation details .) I’m going to take a break from my hybrid conference series and write a post about my latest attempt at handling late work. So far, this system is my favorite, and I plan to reuse it almost unchanged this coming semester. I created it to balance the needs of my students, my teaching staff, and myself. The single-line explanation for my late system is I used tokens to empower my students to decide when they’ll turn in late work. But the devil is in the details, and I put a lot of thought into how and why I set things up the way I did. This post will outline the system itself, what the students thought of it, what I thought of it, and my plans on what to do next time. [Also posted on  medium .] The Late Submission Token System This policy applied to the homeworks that were part of the course’s ten modules. They were released as soon as we had them...