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[professor_pat]

Polly, thanks for your response - do you mean single-spaced (~ 600 words) or double-spaced (~ 300)?

[polly_mer]

More like 300.  However, I also teach people who struggle a lot with reading and writing.  If you teach people who should be more adept (e.g., you can expect students to breeze through a two-page newspaper article in a few minutes instead of giving them three days to read it and still explaining the nickel words during discussion), then the 600 words seems reasonable.

[professor_pat]

The more I read the fora, the more appreciative I am about the students I have! Although my SLAC isn't terribly selective, it's getting more so, and the first place I've seen that is in how much better my students write than the ones I used to have.

OK, I'll anticipate 500-600 words. Thanks again.

[bookishone]

Professor Pat, I only just saw this thread, but I wanted to offer two pieces of advice based on my experience.

One is to limit the length permissible in each answer -- this partially diminishes the problem of "Sally has more time free than I do" and it also means you are not grading 14-pp answers when you anticipated 2-pp ones.

The other is to email them to remind them when the window opens AND email them again to remind them that the window will close "in 3 hours" or whatever. I gave a 24-hour take-home final exam one year because we were scheduled for 7:30 am and I wanted to see how it would work. It worked fine EXCEPT for the two slacker students who forgot to log on and take the exam! I emailed them as soon as I realized that they hadn't logged in, but I ended up having to extend the deadline for one of them, who only saw his email when he woke up, about 5 minutes before the portal closed. For the record, I had gone over the plan umpteen times in class and I'd posted an announcement reminding them, but these two kids rarely attended class, so in future I'll send out personal emails as well. Though sheesh, should I really have to be knocking on their doors to remind these college seniors to take their exams?

[Modified to add: Since this was in lieu of an in-class final during finals period, I put a note on the door of our classroom with instructions in case any students were confused and showed up there instead.]