1) Procrastinating until the last moment to actually do the work (you have never heard of students doing that, have you?) :-). This is a common reason that no matter how long people are given to complete a task, they do not complete it on time, or do so at the last minute.
David, I think you’re kind of missing the point here. The question is whether students could predict their projects’ actual completion time; they’re not trying to predict project completion time given a hypothetical version of themselves which didn’t procrastinate.
If they aren’t self-aware enough to know they procrastinate and to take that into account—their predictions are still bad, no matter why they’re bad. (And someone on the outside who is told that in the past the students had finished −1 days before the due date will just shrug and say: ‘regardless of whether they took so long because of procrastination, or because of Parkinson’s law, or because of some other 3rd reason, I have no reason to believe they’ll finish early this time.’ And they’d be absolutely correct.)
It’s like a fellow who predicts he won’t fall off a cliff, but falls off anyway. ’If only that cliff hadn’t been there, I wouldn’t’ve fallen!′ Well, duh. But you still fell.
David, I think you’re kind of missing the point here. The question is whether students could predict their projects’ actual completion time; they’re not trying to predict project completion time given a hypothetical version of themselves which didn’t procrastinate.
If they aren’t self-aware enough to know they procrastinate and to take that into account—their predictions are still bad, no matter why they’re bad. (And someone on the outside who is told that in the past the students had finished −1 days before the due date will just shrug and say: ‘regardless of whether they took so long because of procrastination, or because of Parkinson’s law, or because of some other 3rd reason, I have no reason to believe they’ll finish early this time.’ And they’d be absolutely correct.)
It’s like a fellow who predicts he won’t fall off a cliff, but falls off anyway. ’If only that cliff hadn’t been there, I wouldn’t’ve fallen!′ Well, duh. But you still fell.