Correlation of a Flexible Late Day Policy with Student Stress and Programming Assignment Plagiarism: (Abstract Only).

A flexible late submission policy can be used to help address breaches of academic integrity and student stress as they relate to programming assignments. To this end, we examine the use of late days -- earned, penalty free deadline extensions -- during our large format, two-semester introductory programming sequence. In particular, we examine correlations between patterns of student assignment submission and student plagiarism. Lexical-analysis-based techniques are used to identify probable cases of plagiarism across student submissions. Furthermore, we present metrics for estimating student stress at submission time. Our metric utilizes the automated grading score of the student"s current and previous submission attempts, the imminence of the assignment"s deadline, and the availability of late days. We corroborate these patterns with self-reported student surveys conducted at the end of the academic year.