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Category: Project

Description: Homework is vital to undergraduate student learning, but college students also rank it as one of their biggest stressors. Online homework deadline times may affect student learning outcomes and mental health. Particularly, the de facto standard of 11:59 p.m. potentially contributes to a lack of sleep and may encourage waiting until the night an assignment is due. Yet little research has experimentally investigated the effect of homework deadline times. This paper presents a quasi-experiment in a business statistics course where different sections are randomly assigned a 4 p.m. or 11:59 p.m. homework deadline. Results from surveys (n = 84) and sentiment analysis of course evaluations indicate students prefer 11:59 p.m. deadlines and report less stress from them. However, these perceptions do not translate into significant differences in learning outcomes. The study suggests avenues for further research on homework deadlines.