Learning how to be late

And then there was the Penn State student who used the "death in the family" excuse once too often.

"It was an Italian student," recalled Carol Shloss, an English professor of 30 years who now teaches at Stanford. "Every time he had a paper due, he had a grandmother who had died. That was a three-strikes-you're-out rule. You don't have three grandmothers -- not in an Italian family."

For college students, spring is the season of formal dances and informal lawn parties, of last gatherings of friends before the summer or life beyond the gates.

But it's also when final papers come due, and then excuses fly.

There are old standbys -- illness, towed cars, family crises -- but also new ones. Hard drives and computer viruses, not dogs, devour homework these days. One student told University of Central Arkansas composition instructor Beverly Carol Lucey that an exploding blender drenched his paper with an appetite suppressant smoothie.

Some educators believe late papers -- and the excuse-making that goes with them -- are on the rise. Many lump the trend in with grade inflation as evidence of declining standards, a growing sense of student entitlement and a mollycoddling campus culture in which instructors are expected to act more like friends and therapists than teachers.

University of Massachusetts-Lowell English teacher Diana Archibald lays down a tough policy on extensions, granting few and demanding tow truck receipts and doctors' notes to corroborate students' stories.

But she will make exceptions. One of her students works 50 hours per week, cares for a sick mother and pays a mortgage.

"When that student tells me she has to turn in something late, I say 'sure,"' Archibald said.

Life crises aside, many think plain, old sloth is the real problem.

A national student survey recently found that nearly two-thirds of students spent 15 hours or fewer per week doing coursework, and about 20 percent of both freshmen and seniors claimed to spend fewer than five hours per week.

For the truly lazy, a feature on the Web site student.com generates automatic excuse-requesting e-mails. Users pick the phrases they want, asking for "a bit of slack" or a "slight favor" because they "have SO much work to do" and could never finish the assignment "in the complete way you deserve."

"As an isolated phenomenon it might not be so serious, but it has to be seen in the overall context of diminishing expectations," said Bradford Wilson, executive director of the National Association of Scholars, a group that is working to combat what it believes is a decline in college standards.

Extensions for illness or family tragedy are reasonable, he said, "but my impression is all a student needs to do is ask and he will be obliged."