When I ask clients, “When did you start procrastinating?,” I often hear responses like this:

“When I was in junior high school, I got this big, hard assignment. I knew I should get started right away but I always found something more fun to do. I waited until the last minute when the adrenaline pushed me to crank it out. I was afraid I’d get a bad grade because I had done it so last-minute but, lo and behold, I got a good one. That gave me the message that by procrastinating, I’d generate the adrenaline to get me to do the task. Before long, I was procrastinating on most unpleasant tasks — I was addicted to adrenaline.”

Of course, procrastination tends to reduce the quality of the work produced, not exactly the sort of lifelong work habits we’re trying to engender in our students. So, you might want to try one or more of these procrastination deterrents:

— Offer a few-minute lesson on overcoming procrastination, perhaps based on my previous post, “Overcoming Procrastination.” Or just distribute a student-oriented adaptation of that post to your class.

— Give assignments unlikely to earn a decent grade if done last-minute.

— Have students submit a key part of a large assignment early: for example, a list of the resources the student will use as the basis for a term paper.

— When those assignments get turned in, don’t get soft on the grading. Remember, giving a good grade to work that likely was done last-minute only reinforces procrastination, and, in turn, causes lower-quality work.

— Think twice about having liberal extension policies. For example, on quiz day, a student raises his hand and asks, “Could we have one more week?” A number of students cry out in support. Nice professor that you are, you grant their wish, thereby punishing the students who had taken the time to fully prepare. Of course, that rewards the procrastinators and suggests to them that they can continue to procrastinate with impunity. Similarly, when you grant an extension to a student on the course’s first written assignment, you risk that student telling classmates that you’re a softie, whereupon you’ll find yourself with ever more procrastinators claiming they had to go to their grandma’s funeral.

— Procrastinators often resort to plagiarism: “Oh no! The paper’s due tomorrow. I’ll just buy one on the Internet!” If you suspect that’s likely to occur in your course, and believe that the benefits of trying to deter plagiarism outweigh the liabilities, you might announce that you’ll be comparing their writing on an in-class assignment with the work they do at home, and when you see a large disparity, you’ll use techniques, including software, to detect plagiarism. For example, you might Google a couple of unique-seeming phrases from their essay to see if they came from another source. For other plagiarism-detection strategies, see Iowa State University’s Deterring and Detecting Plagiarism.