Few high school experiences are more nerve-wracking than the last Home Access Center check of the marking period. The suspense is almost unbearable as one struggles to remember an absurdly long password and waits 45 seconds for the page to load. When the grades are finally revealed, reactions tend to vary – but, more often than not, there is one grade that just isn’t up to standards.

So what’s a student to do? The obvious route is to ask the class’s teacher for the coveted privilege of an extra credit assignment. This is an easy fix for the problem at hand: in exchange for an all-nighter or two of cramming information he “forgot” to read when it was assigned and scraping together some semblance of a project, the student ideally receives just enough of a grade boost to bump him up to his desired letter grade. Naturally, there are some moral implications to this course of action.

Extra credit was intended to be a reward for students who choose to go above and beyond the typical expectations of the class. In certain cases, however, teachers feel inclined to offer extra credit opportunities to those students who they felt worked hard during the marking period but slipped up on a hard test or assignment. However, more often than not there are students who abuse this opportunity, neglecting their work throughout the near-entirety of the marking period in the hopes that they can achieve their expectations through extra credit later on.

There are several flaws in this way of thinking: for one, students who fail to work hard and complete assignments throughout the marking period have essentially lost for themselves many of their missing points through sheer laziness, and it is unfair to those students who have made an effort to extend the opportunity to erase the results of their negligence. Secondly, last-minute “point grubbing” is by no means easy for a teacher to accommodate.

The chaos that comes with the closing weeks of every marking period is stressful enough as it is, what with last-minute grading of seemingly endless tests and essays as well as student requests to fix mistakes or address problems with their grades. This workload is only increased by the desperate appeals of the same students who could not be bothered to stay awake in class just a few weeks before. And, of course, if an extra credit assignment is given, it will have to be added to the already-daunting pile of yet ungraded assignments.

This is not to say that all extra credit is unfair or unnecessary: many students who earn it are well-deserving of its merit, and teachers often do consider it reasonable to allow for extra credit late in the marking period. However, by no means should students depend on extra credit to fix the ill-effects of their slacking off during the vast majority of the class. It would probably be easier to spend a few extra minutes on homework and to try staying awake in class anyway – and chances are, you’ll thank yourself when you’re not staying up until three in the morning on a last-minute reconnaissance mission for your math grade.