Deadlines & late work

The Schedule stage asks three questions in plain words and shows you the answer as a sentence before you save.

What this does

Dates on an assignment do three different jobs, and keeping them apart is the whole design:

Date	Job
Opens / closes	The access window. Nothing can be started or handed in outside it.
Due	Marks work late. Blocks nothing unless late hand-ins are switched off.
Missing after	A reporting threshold. Doesn’t close anything.

Read that table before setting anything. A due date alone doesn’t stop a hand-in; a due date plus Accept late hand-ins: off does.

Set the dates

The flow is three questions and a review step.

1. When can they work on it?

Outside this window nobody can start or continue an attempt. This is the only gate that actually blocks.

Any time — anyone enrolled starts whenever they like.
From a date — hidden until that moment, then open with no end.
Between two dates — opens and closes. After it closes nobody can start or hand in.

2. When is it due?

The due date marks work late. Whether late work is then accepted is your answer to the next question.

No due date — nothing is ever marked late or missing.
A date for everyone — everybody is due at the same moment.
A number of days after each person starts — each learner gets the same length of time, counted from their own enrolment.

That last option is the one to reach for when people join continuously. Somebody who enrols in March and somebody who enrols in June both get, say, fourteen days — no single date would be fair to both.

3. What happens to late work?

Accepted — the hand-in goes through, marked late, with an optional penalty the grader can apply.
Not accepted — the hand-in is refused. The learner sees “The deadline has passed and late work is not accepted.”

The refusal only fires on work that is already late by the assignment’s own reckoning, measured against the deadline that learner holds — so an extension or an accommodation moves it with them.

Two numbers go with it:

Counts as missing after (days) — a reporting threshold. It does not close the assignment.
Penalty per day (%) — a suggestion shown to the grader. Never applied to a score automatically.

4. Review

The last step shows exactly what you’re about to save as a sentence — “Opens 3 March · Due 14 days after each person enrols · Late work accepted for 7 days at 10 %/day.” Where a time limit applies it says so, with a link to change it.

What it warns you about

The flow refuses to let you save a contradiction silently:

“The due date falls after the assessment closes, so nothing can be handed in on time.”
“The due date falls before the assessment opens.”
“There is no due date, so the late-work settings will not apply.”

Defaults for your kind of organization

New assignments start with a late policy that suits your organization’s type rather than a single platform default — a school’s policy differs from a workplace’s, where a fortnight’s grace and no penalty is more usual. Change it per assignment; the default only decides where you start.

Give someone more time

Extensions live on the Submissions roster, not on the schedule.

Extend on a row moves that one person’s deadline. “Only this person’s deadline moves. Everyone else keeps the original date.”
Extend for N without a hand-in does the same for everyone on the page who hasn’t submitted. “Only the learners without a hand-in on this page get the new date.”

Extensions move the deadline for the people you pick and nobody else. There’s no way to accidentally move the whole cohort from here.

Give one person extra time

Extra time on the clock is separate from a later deadline. It lives on the Timing card, under Individual adjustments → Manage adjustments.

Set an adjustment — +50 %, for instance — and that learner gets a longer timer while everybody else keeps the standard one. A 30-minute assignment becomes 45 minutes for them, enforced on the server rather than just displayed.

Extra time and an extension answer different questions: an adjustment lengthens the clock once an attempt is open; an extension moves the deadline. Somebody may need one, the other, or both.

Advanced

Under Advanced sit prerequisites and the drop policy for this assignment — the same controls documented in Prerequisites and Drop policies, summarised inline so you can see whether anything is set without leaving the page.

Reference

Field	What it controls
Opens at / Closes at	The access window. The only hard gate
Due at	The moment work becomes late
Days after enrolment	A per-learner deadline, 1–365 days from their own start
Accept late hand-ins	Off refuses a late hand-in. On accepts it and marks it late
Counts as missing after	Reporting only
Penalty per day	A suggestion to the grader, never automatic
Hard close	After this, the assignment cannot be opened at all
Time limit	Optional, once an attempt is opened. The earlier of the timer and the hard close wins
Individual adjustments	Extra time for one person, set on the Timing card. Enforced server-side

Times are shown in your own time zone, and the panel says which.

Troubleshooting

Work came in after the deadline. Late hand-ins are accepted on that assignment. Turn off Accept late hand-ins to refuse them, or add a close date to stop submissions entirely.

I turned off “Accept late hand-ins” and it still let them submit. Check whether that learner is actually late against their own deadline — an extension or an accommodation moves the refusal with them.

The penalty wasn’t taken off the score. It never is. It’s shown to whoever marks the work as a suggestion.

Everyone’s deadline moved when I only meant to extend one person. Extensions apply only to the rows you picked. If the whole cohort moved, the due date on the Schedule stage was changed instead.

The late settings seem to do nothing. There’s no due date, so nothing is ever late. The flow warns about this before saving.

Two learners have different deadlines for the same assignment. Either the due date is set per learner (“a number of days after each person starts”), or one of them holds an extension.