Fortunately, I don’t really have to deal with the “homework” excuses, in the sense that assessed work is all handed in through the departmental office, and requests for extensions have to go through “official” channels.
But I do get the emails about why they couldn’t make it to classes, and it’s just like reading some of those court cases. Do I believe this story or don’t I? How lame is that excuse? Or simply, you what? Are you taking the piss? (I’m not going into details just in case any of them find this blog.)
Mind you, at least they usually do get in touch with some sort of explanation, probably because early absences tended to get brusque emails with dark hints about the consequences of non-attendance.
What, then, are the a) lamest, b) most inventive (but somehow suspicious) and c) most unbelievable excuses you’ve heard from students for their failure to make it to class? Names etc may of course be changed to protect the “innocent”. (And if you have any entertaining homework excuses you haven’t recently blogged somewhere else, feel free to add those too.)
19 comments on “The dog ate my homework, etc”
As a stude I was an absolute disgrace. At Uni I probably had a 50% attendence rate overall. When you consider that I had full attendence for a couple of modules I was mad for, this will tell you that I just disappeared in others. Once, during a 13 week module, I attended week 6, never went again, and mispelled the tutor’s name on the coursework. He still passed me. This goes both ways, though. I did a introductory radio course. My tutor was pregnant at the time, gave us specific guidlines for the coursework, then contadicted these outlines herself when marking them. No excuses were offered for that!
In another lifetime, I was a saff writer on a magazine. One day, hung over and fed up, at about 9.30 am, I phoned my office manager to say I wasn’t coming in. When it came to the excuse bit, I couldn’t be bothered to insult her with an excuse. “I’m fed up and I can’t be arsed, today,” I told her. She was a good Liverpudlian lady, though. “That’s allright, love”, she replied. It was never mentioned again. See, sometimes honesty is the best policy.
I once had a student skip the first 3 weeks of discussion section (for all I know he had been skipping lecture, too) and then finally come in late during the 4th meeting. After class he told me that the reason he hadn’t been showing up was because there had been a problem with his tuition. I refrained from pointing out that we did not check receipts at the door each day.
I saw him once more at the midterm – which he failed – and then never got a paper or final exam from him. I think he now plays football (American) professionally.
“Hair emergency.”
I did have a fourth-year subject that I only went to one lecture in, had a raging row with the lecturer and never went again, because I knew ever time would end the same way.
It was a touch obvious, since there were fewer than 20 in the class, but I got the lecture notes the night before the exam and passed with a “credit” grade. It was, however, a particularly inane multi-choice exam in which he used the same questions year after year, so it wasn’t very difficult – such were the academic standards at agricultural science at Australia’s “top” university.
Well, I’m not a teacher, but I get excuses, too, at work. Seems mostly related to burning the candle at both ends. Missy just can’t make it in at her start time–thinks she should be able to wake up and decide “to work from home!” And without even calling in. I call this studentitis–she hasn’t made the adjustment from college to the real world.
Yet another man saunters in at 11, claiming he works late at the office (after I’ve left), all due to children at home being sick. Still, I notice he does this over and over. Unfortunately, we’re colleagues of equal rank (despite sometimes being on the same team and my being the project leader) and I have no recourse even though I’ve been nominally his supervisor. Luckily, no longer!
i once called into work pregnant AFTER missing a day with no excuse. i simply told my boss i had been too upset to think clearly.
the worst was, i was NOT preggers.
Two computer malfunctions today. Paper due. To her credit, one wrote back, said she’d lied and apologized, and that she was in the middle of a personal crisis and had to find a new living situation. Not a problem. Keep me posted.
Argh. Then, the student from hell. Single (?) mother, nine children, returning student, refuses to accept that the prf has any authority. Comes in disruptively late (I run late myself, so am ok with the occasional late appearance, but I’m like, 2 minutes late and the prof — she’s like, 15-35 minutes late, and disruptive in a clueless way. Emails the day the paper’s due — last night, kids down with scabies. No prob, that’s why the syllabus says to just bring a doctor’s note. Brings meds instead, so I can see that the children have scabies. Puts tubes down on class tables. Yuck. Does not get it. Not socialized to interact with humans. shows up 35 minutes late for 50 minute class today with paper one week late (I gave it back immediately upon receiving said paper — no citations. Don’t ask about the idiocy of the “I don’t understand the Chicago Style” conversation. She had one day to fix it, according to the syllabus). So today, she turns it in, and I point out that I am in no way obliged to take the paper. And that it is not a good thing to miss class for a paper that may not be accepted. It only gets worse. Citations in no way resemble a format known to man. Try to make sense of a paper that doesn’t actually fulfill the assignment. It’s a film review. doesn;t actually mention the film more than twice. Instead, it’s all about porphyria. Really sad part. An option was to review an article and she had one that she could have reviewed with the same information in her bibliography. Just crap. Talked to dean, who agreed that failing was the best option. Failed the paper. Waiting for the excuses.
I agree. Honesty is best. Teaching last year on a lovely morning I got:
‘Sorry I’m late. Surf was excellent though.’
I’m jealous of you lot – save for excusals from summer school, and special circumstances forms for exams, I get hardly any of this. OU tutorials are optional.
Some of ‘my’ students are in fact in tents in Afghanistan or Iraq, emailing in assignments. It probably gives them a different take on the social impact of the Blitz. It could lead to some fab excuses, as well, but my best military one yet is ‘I had to go to Germany to mend a helicopter’, which is pretty lame given the possibilities.
My dad was a teacher for a time. He tells me that his best one was: ‘My next door neighbour died and I had to help lay out the body’. 10/10 for imagination – less for credibility.
Next exam paper bloopers. Unfortunately, I just set an exam paper which asked people to talk about ‘Stalin, Mussolini, and Hilter’, so I’m not in a position to throw any stones. Not that they bleeding noticed, mind.
By the way, I never really held with this ‘academia vs. real world’ idea. I think that it’s damaging on a number of different levels to think and talk that way. But I digress.
Now, I didn’t think to ask about your own best and worst excuses. Disgraceful idle slackers, I don’t know. Shocking. But, hey, keep them coming (don’t forget it’s probably a good idea not to use your real/full name if you still work at the same place…).
Can you compete with ‘hair emergency’ and ‘surf was excellent’? From either side of the fence. Waiting to hear from you.
ADM: I don’t think anyone knows what to do in situations like that. I understand that mature students can have all sorts of personal and family pressures (and yet many nonetheless do better work than the ‘unburdened’ young students). But why does anyone sign up for university if they’re not prepared to accept some basic rules? Like: the lecturers are in charge for a very good reason, and you should write papers relevant to the questions asked…
Stevesorry, I mean Chris: Wow, mending helicopters. I know what you mean about ‘university v the real world’, but making the transition from the flexibility of doing a (humanities) degree to standard office hours can be a real issue. But I’ll bet the students making all the excuses are exactly the same ones who later on can’t seem to make it to work on time…I once apologised for being late on account of getting lost in the fog. It brought the house down, and I slipped though on the strength of that.
How about ‘Tower Bridge was up’ as an excuse for lateness coming south of the river to school. And in Northern Ireland in the 70s ‘My assignment was blown up in the postbox’? Neither were mine – I hope I can be more imaginative…….
QUOTE: “But why does anyone sign up for university if they’re not prepared to accept some basic rules? Like: the lecturers are in charge for a very good reason, and you should write papers relevant to the questions asked…”
Oh come on! It’s only academia, Sharon. It’s not as if it’s the Catholic church or anything…
Re: Work. I think it’s unnatural to expect someone to a: be at the same place for 40 hours a week and b: perform the same tasks to a consistantly reasonoble standard. This sudden, subtle plan by the gvt to make days off almost a civil offence is a bleedin’ outrage. I take my moral instruction from Petronella Wyatt. I doubt if she can even remember where her place of employment is.
My wife’s Russian professor required every student to call their office once a semester to offer in Russian an excuse for missing class. Apparently they got extra points for creativity, but they also got to skip one class, if they didn’t have an absence for some other reason.
My take-home midterms seem to have sparked any number of computer failures some of which are more credible than others (including one full-on motherboard meltdown, from a student who claims he’s been e-mailing me work all semester to an address which he recently realized isn’t mine but which didn’t bounce the messages).
Wasn’t there a piece a few years back about the remarkably high mortality rate among the grandmothers of students?
Jonathan, I saw that somewhere quite recently. (where was it now?)
Steve: yeah, and football’s only a game…
And I’ve gone completely blank on who Petronella Wyatt is.
I got an excuse this semester from a girl who said she could come to class because she’d had her first pap smear and was tramatized by the event.
I once wrote a desperate email from Niamey, Niger to my advisor saying I might miss an exam because they’d barred me from getting on the plane back, because my name had been spelled wrongly on my air ticket (how the hell do you misspell “Ng”? It was “Tg”). I got the next flight out *one week later*, but then lost my baggage when I missed my connecting flight (a poor little bird got sucked into the engine causing a 2 hour delay in Niamey), where all my notes were stored. The misspelling (still on the original ticket) was a source of great amusement to assorted Air France staff all over Charles De Gaulle airport, and I swear I could hear chuckles every time I left a help desk.
Luckily I went straight to my professors on return, who were quite sympathetic if a little bemused (especially the ones who had worked in Africa before), and one of them even lent me her entire stack of readings to photocopy (which was more than I actually had). I swear it’s all true! (stop looking at me like that, I’ve got documents to prove it and everything) I did make the exam on time, and I even passed, IIRC.
I had a student miss class because she had to see Billy Graham.
Well, today one student couldn’t make it because she had to go home yesterday to visit the dentist. And this is, I’m quite sure, totally true. The situation with dentists (ie, lack of them) round here has been a scandal for years now. *I* don’t have a regular dentist.
And, returning to the subject of surf, a second student got leave to miss the class because he’s gone to a surfing competition in Cornwall. I am cynical enough to wonder whether I should check that this competition really exists.
Thankfully, it’s reading week next week. Then one week and it’s Easter holidays! Yay!