By Shanice Davis

“My dog ate my homework.” “My printer broke…” Sound familiar? It’s safe to say that by now

in our educational careers, we are all probably guilty of giving excuses to our professors as to

why we don’t have an assignment completed.

For one reason or another, students believe that if they come up with the best excuse possible,

then maybe, just maybe, they’ll get a pass; or maybe not. Students may think they have come up

with every excuse in the book, but no one knows them better than the professors themselves.

So what kinds of excuses did students give their professors for not having their work in on time?

The results were half and half. Some professors said they didn’t usually get excuses while other

professors were overjoyed by the thought of the many excuses past students had given them.

Professor Edward Balian, Data Analysis and Operation Management instructor, explained that in

his eight years of teaching at CSUSM he has heard a boatload of excuses.

“They forgot, they never got the assignment straight in the first place, they were absent from

class when the assignments were first given, they were given the wrong information by a

classmate,” Professor Balian said. “There were also legitimate reasons like family emergencies;

totally understandable.”

It was clear that he was not a novice in the trade of excuses, more like a Jedi Master in sensing

phony justifications.

“They lost their books, or they lost their class notes,” Professor Balian said. “Basically excuses

for the most part that will never fly in the real business world.”

CSUSM Sociology professor Garry Rolison also discussed some excuses other students have used.

“It’s computer problems, the computer took my paper, I forget to get my disk, I went to print it

out, but the printer is no longer working,” Professor Rolison said.

Among other notables Professor Rolison said to have had included excuses such as, “It’s today? I

thought it was yesterday,” “I don’t remember this, you sure you said it was due today,” “I didn’t

read the book so I couldn’t answer anything,” or “I didn’t know what you were talking about, I

was so confused I couldn’t write the assignment.”

CSUSM Physics professor Chuck DeLeone stated that he’d received a range of excuses, some of

them among the usual cliche excuses, while others maintained more creativity.

“The other popular excuses being some traffic or vehicular excuses,” Professor DeLeone said.

“Every time an assignment was due, something happens to the road.”

Professor DeLeone began to chuckle as he remembered a more recent excuse that occurred

during finals week. Around the time that the fires broke out there was a paper he’d assigned to be

due at 5 p.m., and a student told him, “The fires broke out at 4 p.m. that day” as their excuse as

to why they never turned in the assignment.

Because there was a fire, about half of the assignments had not been turned in, and at that point,

everybody automatically assumed that since the fires began an hour before the assignment was

due, that the due date was indefinitely delayed. Professor DeLeon deems this excuse as the best

one to date.

The moral of the story is, do your assignments so you won’t lose unnecessary points and perhaps

become the source of a new story to tell. Remember, they know about almost every excuse in the

book, and they’ve heard it all before.