What is Your Excuse?

Many people have a go-to excuse. One person can use the same excuse many times over with different people. Being able to adequately defend or justify a fault or offense is a skill that many students hone over their years in school.

In the computer age, saying your dog ate your homework no longer works.

“The excuse I hear most often is that I ‘thought I turned it in’ or ‘I turned it in and there must have been an error on Blackboard.’ I also hear about computers catching viruses all the time and deleting everything,” one communications instructor said. This is an approachable excuse. Most people have had computer issues at some point in their lives. By having an excuse ready that is relatable and realistic, the hope is to inspire sympathy.

The success of your excuse often depends on who you have to present it to. Professor Jessica Kingsley said, “I like to give students the benefit of the doubt…Life happens and pays no attention to our due dates.”

There are other instructors who no longer believe their students deserve the benefit of the doubt. One said, “After teaching for almost 15 years, I can usually tell when a student is lying, and I actually ask that students just refrain from trying to offer me an explanation unless they
can provide documentation for it. This way, no one has their time wasted.” They later said, “Believe it or not, I also hear about dead relatives quite often as well. I now ask for some sort of documentation about deaths in the family because of how frequently this particular excuse is utilized.”

Other excuses are so good that they don’t even seem like excuses.

One instructor said, “I had one student recently that is a bank teller and they were held at gunpoint and had to be the person that handed the money over to the bank robber…the story was in the news, so this particular absence was definitely excused.” Sure, you could have a buddy come to your job and hold you at gunpoint, but wouldn’t it just be easier to go to class?