Here's one of my concerns--the purpose of the work we do in class is meant to scaffold on itself so that later work can benefit from the lessons learned from earlier work (e.g., all of those feature essay RRSs should help you write your own feature essay; the memoir essay's takeaways and the album review's takeaways all come into play in the feature essay). So, falling behind hurts you all because it prevents the scaffolding of lessons learned; doing it all at once means that all the works is getting done while you're in the "same" cognitive stage...so what's the value? If there were no late penalties, would it cause you to turn in lots of stuff late, which might--in the short term--"feel better" because you're not penalized but in the long run work against you because it hampers your growth?