This afternoon I attended a lab section at university. The concept of lab sections is quite boring. Normally, you would receive the corrected homework from your teaching assistant and talk about it for about an hour. The last 30 minutes or so you would talk about the assignments for next week. This time however, our teaching assistant surprised us, when he blatantly told us, that, unfortunately, he had to disregard our homework, because we had submitted it past midnight and had therefore missed the deadline. As we work in groups of three students and I had not submitted the homework this time, I looked at my fellow student, who had submitted the homework, and he also seemed quite irritated. All three of our group were flabbergasted. Again, our teaching assistant said: According to my mail client, you submitted the homework two minutes past midnight. That’s two minutes too late. We are supposed to handle this issue very strictly, so I had to disregard your homework this time. Bam. That was a hard one. We didn’t know what to say. Looking at the other students in the room, you could almost feel in the air what they were thinking: Oh, my god! Luckily we met the deadline this time. Although it were just two minutes, technically he was right. So my fellow student just said: OK. I guess we’ll send it in earlier next time. It was a very strange situation. While I already reasoned, if I should waste time by starting a discussion with our teaching assistant or just escalate the case to the student representatives right away, our teaching assistant told us it was just a joke. Everything went well in the end. All three of us fell for him, though.
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