Learning Connection
Every university student spends time in preparing assignments - most university students spend a lot of time doing them! And you need to get them in on time to meet university guidelines. Each assignment has a due date which is shown in the Course Information booklet or Course Homepage. Completing your assignments by those dates is a part of being a successful student. However, at the same time as you are studying and preparing your assignments you are likely to have other demands on your time - e.g. work, family and sport commitments - and you may even be wanting to have a social life! So the ability to complete the steps below will help you get those assignments in on time.
You can also check out the summary of the information on this web page and information about additional resources.
You have a lot of things to do and only one of those is study? You want to be able to manage all aspects of your life AND be a successful student? If so, you will need to prioritise your time and your activities to ensure that the most important jobs get done - and that includes your assignments. Some resources which will enable you to complete both short term tasks, such as attending lectures and work commitments, and long term tasks such as completing assignments, are study period and weekly planners, the Learning Guide: Student lifestyle: Creating a balance and the Learning Guide: Managing your time and workload.
All students want to get their assignments in on time and the majority of students succeed in doing it. But some students frequently miss deadlines for assignments. So what is the difference between students who regularly meet the deadlines and those who don’t? One important difference is likely to be motivation (or the lack of it). Motivation is a desire to achieve a goal, combined with the energy to work towards that goal. Certainly a student who is motivated about their program usually enjoys university life, feels they are benefiting from study and is able to meet academic deadlines. You can motivate yourself by:
Deciding on what goals are most important to you is a significant step in becoming motivated about meeting the due dates for your study. It is likely that you have a variety of goals and finishing your degree successfully is one of them. If you recognise that your long term goals can be reached by meeting short term goals (i.e. when I complete this assignment I will have taken one more step towards my degree) it will help you prioritise tasks so that you can do the assignment before involving yourself in other more appealing activities. To help you set and achieve your goals make a list of:
To help you identify your goals check out in ‘Step 3: Focus on goals’ in the online workshop Finding motivation to study.
Beginning is sometimes the most difficult part of the assignment and so it can be useful to think of 'beginning' as a series of activities. Although assignments can take many shapes and forms (e.g. writing about a topic, answering a question, solving a problem, designing equipment, creating a program, constructing a diagram, etc) the first activities are often the same and are likely to include:
Students sometimes get stuck on the next activity which is to begin to write (or draw, construct, program…) It is helpful if you realise that doing an assignment is challenging work. It needs a good plan, time, skills and some rewards. Some students find it useful to constructing a first draft, so that they can see their ideas, words, calculations or shapes at an early stage and then they spend time editing and changing what they have done in a series of drafts. Other students find it more efficient to formulate their ideas in their head or as notes on paper and then do their assignment carefully so that it only needs minimal changes. Whichever process is best for you the important thing is to begin your assignment and keep working at it.
Different students find different strategies useful in helping them compose and complete an assignment. Some strategies include:
You will be familiar with some of the above strategies because they are likely to have contributed to you completing assignments in the past and so you will want to keep on using those. Others you might want to experiment with to see if they are useful for you. You may discover other strategies by talking with students in your Program.
Sometimes students are motivated, have done their planning and preparation and have begun their assignment but a personal event or sickness gets in the way of them completing it on time. If that happens to you, as soon as you suspect that you will not be able to meet a due date for an assignment, check your Course Information or Course Homepage to find out what steps you need to take to negotiate an extension. Most schools will expect you to provide documentary evidence such as a doctor’s certificate or a personal statement giving a reason for lateness of an assignment before they will agree to an extension. If there are significant reasons why you cannot meet a due date for an assignment, but a doctor’s certificate is not appropriate documentary evidence, you can see a counsellor at Learning Connection to work out alternatives. The most important thing to remember is to contact the relevant member of staff or the school office as soon as you think you are unlikely to meet the assignment date. You can also check out Negotiating extensions.
Getting assignments in on time is about prioritising your time, motivating yourself, planning your assignment and doing it. If you have a medical or significant personal reason for being unable to complete an assignment by the due date, you can contact the relevant staff member to try to negotiate alternatives. Good luck with those assignments!
