Where do you stand on extra credit? All but one of the more than 20 faculty who shared their views with us endorsed it. By contrast, in a 1989 survey of faculty across a range of disciplines, only 28 percent believed that extra credit should be offered routinely (Norcross et al., 1989). In a follow-up survey, extra credit was only offered in 13 percent of the courses (Norcross et al., 1993). In a different survey of psychology faculty, 18 percent reported never using extra credit and 67 percent said they offered it in some courses (Hill et al., 1993). More recently, 67 percent of over 300 sociology faculty reported offering it at least once within the past two years (Izienicki & Setchfield, 2019). But there’s still not enough research to establish that beliefs about extra credit have changed across a broad range of disciplines.
