It’s really annoying when students give horrible excuses as to why they aren’t going to be in class or didn’t do their assignments. Most of the time professors are pretty reasonable about their absentee and late work policies, so it’s really a pain when a student seems to expect different treatment from everyone else.

One of the worst excuses I’ve ever heard about why a student didn’t do an assignment was because they didn’t even realize we had class the day before. How difficult it is to remember when you have class? If there’s any question about it, then ask a classmate or e-mail your teacher. There’s absolutely no reason to miss work because you didn’t think you had class. Especially on a relatively small campus where you could easily show up anyway.

Also, don’t kill your grandma or any other member of your family to get out of class. A teacher will notice when your grandma has died four times in the past ten weeks. It really isn’t cute to the classmates that show up to class either. If we know that you’re just going to come up with some lame excuse every time you don’t feel like showing up to class then we won’t want to help you later. Beware of any help you might get; it could be fake.

When it comes to not turning in homework on time because your printer is acting up, shame on you. If an assignment is of any value to you, you’d get it done in time to find out that your printer is on the fritz. When you finish things in a timely fashion, problems like this don’t exist because you could easily go to a friend to print out your work, or the library. The worst case scenario is that you have to do a little walking to print your work out. Not a big deal.

On top of the printer issues excuse, I hate hearing that you lost your flash drive and couldn’t find it in time. We have this thing called a home drive for a reason. You can even access your home drive through MyRU. See that little “My Files” tab? That’s it. Just click on it and you can make your work accessible from just about anywhere with Internet. Thank you, Radford University for making it nearly impossible to not be able to access our work.

If you made one of these mistakes and realize that you won’t be able to get your work turned in when you’re supposed to, don’t go telling the professor that you’re sick. I know people who are “sick” once every couple of weeks, and I really despise telling them what they missed in class.  I could just as easily use that excuse and get away with it, but I don’t. Why? Because I know how ridiculously annoying it is.

When you think about it, showing up to class and doing your work on time can be a real stress reliever. In the long run, it also prevents you from looking like a complete fool in front of your teachers and classmates. I don’t see a down side to just getting things done. It’s what we’re paying for after all.

Cover photo by Alex Morgan

Story photo from Creative Commons

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 29th, 2010 at 12:00 am and is filed under Vent. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.