Why Students Keep Playing the Waiting Game

By the fall of her junior year, current senior Atiyeh Samadi had already written six pages for her IB Extended Essay — a 4000-word research paper considered a core component of IB. She was writing about the Islamic Revolution of 1979 and its effect on Iranian women, and had been to the UMKClibrary to find her required print sources. She’d started as soon as it was assigned during her junior year and had tried to avoid procrastinating. A year later, in February of her senior year, she had less than two weeks left to write the remainder of her essay. She felt like she was capable enough to finish her essay in those two weeks.

But on Feb. 12, a few days away from the deadline, she was well into her fifth hour of typing in a sequestered cubicle at LatteLand, her iced mocha now melted to a mixture of light brown liquid and a few stray ice cubes.

She hadn’t so much as opened the Word document that contained her paper since last year. She still had eight pages to go, and had drastically underestimated the time the essay would take.

“I really wanted my essay to be good since we had so much time to work on it and since I really cared about my topic, but I ended up writing most of it at the last minute,” Samadi said. “It was sheer panic.”

Procrastination has become a prominent factor in students’ lives in the past few years, according to Principal Karl Krawitz. According to DePaul psychology professor and author of “Still Procrastinating?” Joseph Ferrari, 20 percent of Americans are chronic procrastinators, up 15 percent from 1970 — a higher percentage than those who suffer from substance abuse, depression or phobias. This indicates that although procrastination has been prevalent in years past, the number of people who procrastinate as a way of life is on the rise.

For students, increased use of technology, mounting obligations and an acceptance of procrastination in school have contributed to the widespread effects of procrastination. At East, in a survey of 150 students, 92 percent reported that they have procrastinated at least once in the past month as a result of being too busy, being bored with the subject matter or simply lacking the motivation to start projects.

The ubiquity of procrastination has been most noticeable within the past few years, according to math teacher Rick Royer who has spent more than 35 years at East. In his time teaching IB and AP students, he has noticed a change in the pattern of the students’ assignments. With two-week assignments, he’s seen the same questions about directions being asked as a decade ago — except now, he’s seeing those same questions two days before the deadline, whereas he got them in the first few days of the cycle in years past.

“I didn’t notice it so much in the first 35 years I was teaching. Maybe [it happened] a little bit, but nothing like the way it’s been for the past 4-5 years,” Royer said. “There’s no doubt that procrastination is a more rampant problem than it ever was.”

Royer has also seen an increase in students coming to him with excuses about long-term assignments such as take-home tests and other IB assignments. In a 1998 study done by Dr. Ferrari, he found that more than 70 percent of college students had admitted to giving their professor a fraudulent excuse if they didn’t have an assignment finished. Furthermore, the students reported that only 9 percent of professors asked for proof of the excuse — whether it was a death in the family, a printer malfunction or the insistence that they didn’t have time to get it done.

While students such as Samadi cite fatigue from being over-worked and boredom of classes as reasons for procrastinating, teachers such as Royer attribute the root of the upswing in procrastination to deeper forces such as cultural expectations and changes in the way students work, namely with technology.

In an Ohio State study, procrastination and lower grades were linked to the increase in use of social networking sites. While such studies have emphasized the link between distracting websites such as Facebook and Twitter and decreased quality in school work, another impact has risen out of the popularity of the Internet in the past 10 years.

“Facebook and Twitter are always more interesting than my homework and are always updating themselves,” Samadi said. “I think that while social networking makes concentrating hard, the Internet has made homework a lot easier. It’s made the quality of work a lot worse.”

Not only does technology pose the threat of distraction, it provides a sense of false security for students, according to Dr. Krawitz. With the rise of sites like Questia and Google Scholars, legitimate academic journals and other types of information are easily accessible to students at all hours of the day. According to psychologist Mike Hanson, procrastination often represents a thought misfire, when students simply inaccurately estimate the time required or overestimate their own skill set based on an amount of time. With information more accessible than ever before, it becomes feasible to write a pivotal paper, like Samadi did, in a few days — much less in a few hours.

“We didn’t have the luxury of procrastinating in the way that students do now,” Royer said. “Procrastination, I feel, is a part of human nature. But when you have to go to the library during the hours that it sets and search for information in the stacks of books, it’s different. Procrastination is easier to turn to with the Internet.”

According to Dr. Ferrari in a phone interview, procrastination is not simply a result of technology. He believes that the underlying problem within the relationship between technology and work ethic is that students simply use technology in the wrong ways. He believes that technology has always existed that has made procrastination easier, and that in turn there has been the development of a culture that allows procrastination.

“As a society we need to stop excuse-making, and we need to stop accepting the excuses. We need to start giving the early bird the worm. That doesn’t happen anymore,” Dr. Ferrari said. “In the age of political correctness, we cut the worm up and give it to everyone. Give the worm to the early bird.”

Dr. Ferrari believes that widespread and chronic procrastination is a phenomenon that is made light of by society, and that there has been an erroneous move to accommodate these procrastinators. These cultural expectations stem from the school setting where academic and social influences are tightly woven, according to sociology and AP American History teacher Vicki Arndt-Helgesen.

“In fact, right now with the seniors, if they’re still doing their work, they’re hiding it. Until junior year we have another social aspect which is ‘I’m so busy’ which gives permission to procrastinate. And there’s almost a bragging aspect to it,” Arndt-Helgesen said. “We don’t really celebrate the person who plans.”

Yet what concerns educators such as Dr. Krawitz and Royer about the rising trend of putting off work until the last second is its the seemingly universal pull. Procrastination is no longer a practice left to low-achieving second-semester seniors. According to Royer, he now sees students in his Differential Equations class procrastinate profusely, whereas the difficulty of the course prevented it in the past.

Though the difficulty of certain courses may deter students from procrastinating,  according to Arndt-Helgesen the trends in education such as No Child Left Behind, a focus on getting into the “right school” and the changes in the schedule set students up to procrastinate. Block schedule can force juniors and seniors to manage their time, and that it is more similar to a college experience according to Arndt-Helgesen.

With a system in which checking off assignments is the focus, procrastination is positively reinforced. From the survey, 85 percent of the 138 students who procrastinated reported that they finished the assignment and received a good grade on it, reinforcing the idea that procrastinators can be successful. According to psychologist Mike Hanson, procrastination for higher-achieving students may come from the thrill of working under pressure or late at night, while others want the ego boost of boasting about how much work they got done in one night, and the subsequent good grade.

“Unfortunately sometimes students procrastinate and then are rewarded on the other end,” Dr. Krawitz said. “Then they get this thought that ‘I did it once I can do it a second time and a third time’ and that is compounded and creates habits.”

For highly-involved students like Samadi, getting over 100 service hours for IB and doing daily 40-minute math assignments often take the backseat to non-negotiable yearbook deadlines that may last for eight hours after school and imperatives such as picking up her little sister from school each day.

“For me, stuff like that is always more immediate than tomorrow’s homework,” Samadi said. “It’s definitely a conscious decision for me to put homework off.”

Aside from the practical aspects of procrastination for some students, it can serve as a method for dealing with extreme stress and perfectionism. According to Dr. Ferrari, procrastinators are “extremely concerned about what other people think of them.” The fear of producing an inadequate product or simply the stresses of schoolwork can result in a desire to delay working on it. Chronic procrastinators also might see their to-do list as an overwhelming cloud of work, instead of being able to see the list as a collection of smaller tasks. This can make even starting on an assignment seem impossible for the procrastinator.

Procrastination, for some high-achieving students, may simply be a factor of prioritizing. For Samadi, her busy schedule has taught her to watch teachers and learn which classes she can and can’t procrastinate, and activities such as yearbook for her are assignments that lack flexibility.

One thing that also characterizes procrastination in its modern form is that it often results from not the presence of laziness, but with a change in values. For students like freshman Molly Gasperi, her passion for viola and involvement with East lacrosse overshadows her drive to succeed in high school.

“We make a huge deal about being amazing at all these different things like sports and music,” Gasperi said. “I’ve become addicted to them in a way that I would always rather being doing that than homework.”

According to Hanson, teens today don’t view academics and learning as top priorities. While some may have building a sharp resume as a goal, he insists that this is not the same thing as learning. Others may prioritize an extracurricular activity, dating or even video games such as Call of Duty. When surveyed about what they do instead of their homework, East students most often responded they spent time either on the Internet and talking to friends, or taking care of themselves with activities such as exercise and napping.

Despite these changes in the characteristics of procrastination, Dr. Ferrari believes that prioritization and therefore procrastination has always been a part of society.

“Everyone procrastinates, but not everyone is a procrastinator,” Ferrari said. “So people need to learn not how to manage time, but how to manage themselves. Because it’s not going away, it’s just changing.”