“One week till the end of the quarter!” That line is enough to send many WCHS students into a frenzy. It is easy for assignments to pile up between all seven classes, especially for students who are taking AP classes or more rigorous classes in general. With no late penalty, many students wait until the second before the interim or end of quarter to cram in their missing assignments.

Before Spring Break, school wide deadlines were implemented every couple of weeks and dispersed throughout the quarter. Last quarter WCHS only had two deadlines, but this quarter, four deadlines have been placed (including interim and end of quarter deadlines). Although these new checkpoints may seem daunting, they will end up benefiting students’ work habits and grades. Students will start to see positive changes in their individual assignment grades, assessment grades, and overall class grades.

To many students, due dates have no significance. Why should they rush to complete work if it won’t even affect their grade? When students wait till the last few days of the quarter or interim to complete their assignments, the quality of what they are turning in is not going to be as high as if they were turning it in when they were actually learning that material in class.

Assessment grades will also skyrocket due to these new deadlines. Many assignments that teachers assign are to help prepare students for an upcoming quiz or test. If students don’t complete this work prior to the assessment, they don’t have the knowledge or the practice to display their best effort. The deadlines will force students to complete relevant assignments at a time that will actually be beneficial to their learning.

Students often underestimate how much work they really have left to complete. This results in students allotting a significantly shorter amount of time than they really need to do it well. Cramming in all the work at once often results in either not completing all missing work or lazily completing assignments. By having the deadlines closer together, there is not as much work for students to cram in.

According to Oxford Learning, cramming in assignments doesn’t help students retain long term knowledge about the subject. This means that they may forget useful information that could help them in the future; not only in school, but in life. Doing too many assignments at once ends up being a huge waste of time in the long run.

Having to quickly complete a large amount of work in a short amount of time is not good for a student’s mental health as it is very anxiety inducing. With weeks worth of missing assignments and a rapidly approaching end of quarter date, it is easy for students to feel very overwhelmed. This overwhelming feeling can lead to students giving up in a way and not even bothering to do any of the work at all.

Some students say that these additional deadlines just add more stress to students by having more dates that they have to “fear”. Although the idea of deadlines is inherently unpleasant, the deadlines being closer together only helps organize students more so they don’t get stuck in a tricky situation at the end of the quarter.

In addition to benefiting students, this new policy helps teachers by helping disperse all of the work they get handed in to grade. Teachers get massive amounts of assignments turned in right before the end of the interim and quarter. This puts a lot of stress on teachers and gives them less time to complete tasks like lesson planning.

The new deadlines do not get rid of the influx of work teachers will receive on certain days, but help the work be much more manageable. This also gives teachers an opportunity to more accurately see how students in their class are doing and what topics they grasp or need to learn more.

With due dates practically meaningless, these newly implemented deadlines are the only way to keep students on track. Hopefully in the fourth quarter, hearing “One week till the end of the quarter!” doesn’t result in as much panic from WCHS students.