Are late submission penalties hindering retention initiatives?

There is a global interest in retaining students pursuing higher education. There has been an ongoing discussion in Australia about strategies for improving university students’ retention rates. These retention strategies aim to enhance students’ social and academic integration. This paper revisits a proposed unit-level retention initiative that targets academic integration to improve pass rates in a first-year programming unit. The partial implementation results, including the successes and the challenges of executing this unit-level retention plan, are discussed. An exploration of penalty rates that are applied to late submissions of assessments in Australian universities, along with their potential impact on at-risk students, is also presented. The implementation and its findings contribute to the ongoing discussion on initiatives to improve student retention in higher education institutions.