Would you like to know when Dartmouth students are likely to submit their assignments via Canvas, and whether the activity is related to the time and date when the assignment is due? If so, how does the assignment due times affect students’ submission activities? If you are interested in learning about the assignment submission facts, please click on the image below to view the 2015 assignment submission analytics.
These results were derived from 2015 course, course assignment info and submission data. Graded discussions, online quizzes and any assignments that have an ‘online’ submission type were included in the analysis. The assignment that does not have an ‘online’ submission type or a due date/time associated with was excluded from the analysis.
After a few outliers were identified and removed, the median submission time before due date is 30 minutes and the median submission time past due is 1.2 hours. The ‘withoutoutlier’ charts also show that the number of before due submissions is much greater than the total number of past due submissions and the variation in past due submission hour is wider than before due submission hour. All of which imply that majority Dartmouth students tend to submit assignments more often before than past the due time and the likelihood assignment submission time is 30 minutes prior to assignment due time.
Taking all four terms in the year of 2015 into consideration, the evening period from 8 pm to 10 pm is a popular time for assignment submissions, and 10 pm is the peak assignment due time (when assignments are due). Some months show some variability. For instance, in November, there is a peak submission time at 11 pm coupled with a 11 pm peak assignment due time. in April, 11 am arises to be another peak time for assignment submissions in addition to the popular evening submission hours. Faculty might consider these behaviors when choosing due times.
The chart below reveals that a number of assignments contain due date/time that were set between midnight and 8am Eastern time, which prompted some students staying up overnight in order to submit the assignments right around due time. Even though the hourly submission chart reveals that there are variability in median submission time for all submissions at a given submission hour, we can conclude that students tend to submit assignments 30 minutes prior to assignment due time more often than past assignment due time. Therefore, we need to suggest faculty to be mindful when choosing assignment due time.
