What are the best homework excuses in this technological age?
From heartbreak to competing in the Olympics, these assignments are never going to get done
Art by Joy Lai.
Once upon a time, saying your dog ate your homework was a sufficient excuse.
This expression used to be just enough to earn a reluctant smile from a teacher. It’s from the golden era of spiral notebooks, scribbled margins, and printers that choose violence by running out of ink five minutes before class starts.
In this digitalized age, homework assignments are all online. PDFs are our main medium, and everything is automatically saved.
The classic pet excuse has become almost extinct. Unless your dog learned how to hack into your laptop and bypass two-factor authentication, nobody’s buying it.
Yet, Canadian figure skater Madeline Schizas set the gold standard for acceptable homework excuses. Schizas, a McMaster University student, was competing at the 2026 Olympics when she requested an assignment extension.
Submitting homework from an international competition sounds absurd — until it happens. Luckily, Schizas’ extension was granted.
But what counts as a valid excuse for the ordinary student? Which excuses feel justifiable enough to at least make an instructor pause before replying “check the syllabus.”
Believable excuses are few and far between but accidental chaos tops the list. Sometimes life surprises you, and becoming accidentally famous is one of those excuses.
It must be an overnight success, not an influencer-like rise to stardom. Perhaps a silly video you posted went viral, your reaction in the background of a live news clip became a meme, or you rescued a runaway animal.
Whatever the case, the next morning you wake up to a camera crew in your yard and strangers recognizing you at the grocery store.
Next is the deeply modern excuse — technological betrayal.
Whether you were halfway done an assignment or just getting started, laptop crashes are worse than any emotional damage.
Software updates are another level of hell. While not technically dramatic, they feel deeply personal — especially when the update takes 40 minutes and somehow includes a restart, a password failure, and a Wi-Fi issue that never existed before.
The most honest excuse of all is procrastination. The mental preparation to begin an assignment may be the most universally understood reason for delayed work.
While the assignment will take two hours to complete, the process to complete it is much longer. From the three-day preparation to open the document, one unnecessary bedroom cleanup, followed by a four-hour nap, and a sudden urge to get rich quick, procrastination is hard work.
As a last resort, play the emotion card — perhaps a roommate breakup emergency.
Assignments rarely survive a full apartment crisis. If your roommate receives a devastating text, everyone loses productivity.
Some excuses are impossible to challenge because they’re too bizarre to invent.
What made Schizas’ extension request so relatable was that even someone skating on one of the world’s biggest stages faces the same horror every student does — the realization that a deadline exists sooner than expected.
Procrastinators, remember this — instructors usually recognize honesty better than creativity. A believable explanation often works better than theatrical storytelling. Saying you genuinely mixed up dates will land better than inventing an elaborate disaster involving raccoons, floods, or mysterious software errors.
Still, the Olympics are one good excuse. That’s one extension nobody can argue with.
