At my alma mater, using such a service would almost certainly constitute a violation of the academic Honor Code. It would be better to just turn the paper in late (as I did several times) than to risk attempting this on a professor who knows how to open a corrupted file in Notepad...

I may or may not have used this excuse to buy more time with various assignments once or twice.

For one class, where I ended up not needing to use the excuse because the deadline was extended, I needed to pass in an audio slideshow. I hadn't finished it, so I just opened up notepad, copied the text of War & Peace something like 16 times to bump up the file size, saved it as a .wmv, and voila.

I think most schools would consider it a violation. And it sucks for people who honestly DO get stuck with corrupted files since they'll always be suspect.

Georgia Tech had a simple solution to this. They emailed your file back to you with a link to acknowledge it is as you intended it. If it wasn't, you emailed the file again and repeated the process.

Once you acknowledged the file as suitable, the application would then compare it to a bank of submissions from previous semesters to catch plagiarists. This was 1997, who knows what they have now, especially since Tech's College of Computer Science includes a department devoted to computers in education.

I just remember my best friend trying to submit a final paper a few weeks ago. The server was so overloaded with everyone submitting final papers and checking grades that it took about two hours for it to go through. And apparently since the paper stopped transmitting at some point and started again it corrupted. (she also used yousendit.com to send the paper directly to the professor, though, since she wasn't sure it would go through at all, fortunately)

So fucking stupid.

a) When have word files been corrupted in the past decade? This might have worked in 1995 but not now.

b) I usually give my students several weeks to write a paper. If you don't have one by midnight, I can't imagine you're going to write anything worthwhile in the additional six hours.

c) Most schools have (sometimes proprietary) course management websites. The one I most recently used allowed me to accept submissions online at a set time. So no more faking your computers clock.
Since the IT guys are in house, I got them to convert word -> pdf and preview the pdf before the student checked a box that said "everything looks ok". Otherwise the paper was never submitted. Worst case they could submit plain text.

so boo. And in the article the kid goes on to say "At least they're not cheating or copying from a roommate". Well, have you heard of turnitin.com? Also, I can remember if I read something identical in another paper.

Last year I had a kid who wrote a bunch of crappy answers except for one pithy paragraph that was beautifully composed. 0.5 second Google search told me that it was a direct cut and paste from Wikipedia (and he wasn't the author). FAIL.

But in the end none of this really matters. More often that not I just overlook such tardiness because it really doesn't help the student in any way. All that time and effort put into cheating the deadline could have easily been put into the paper.

I had a problem a few years ago when a professor's personal email (which he specified as the acceptable submission method) kept bouncing back my emails, both the ones with assignments attached and the attachment-free emails explaining the problem. Yikes.

I ended up sending him an email with attachment and explanation to his university address (so he could see the time-stamp on the submission), leaving a voicemail on his office phone, and making an unexpected trip over to the university as soon as the office opened the next schoolday to drop a paper copy in his box.

(Overkill? Yes, but the prof's mood and leniency were unpredictable, and I wanted to make every effort to assure he would accept the work. As it happened, he thanked me and apologized for the inconvenience.)

There are always ways to compensate for a technical glitch, and students should be responsible enough to find those compensatory measures.

For what it's worth, I have seen corrupted word files in the last year or so, so it does still happen. Usually seems to be an issue with a file created on the new version and opened on the old, or the other way around.

I get rid of all those problems by only accepting printed papers, and having them due at a class meeting. At least from undergraduates.

Cripes, I was doing this kind of stuff as a freshman in high school. In like 1993.