How assignment late penalty calculator works
A late-work policy is four small rules that interact in confusing ways: a per-day penalty (often 5% per day), an optional grace period where no penalty applies, an optional floor that the final mark can never drop below, and an optional cutoff after which the work is not accepted at all. This tool applies all four in one pass so there is no need to reason about them one clause at a time.
The penalty is charged as a percentage of the raw score per late day, which is how most syllabi phrase it. A score of 80 handed in 3 days late at 5% per day loses 15% of 80 — a final mark of 68, not 65. The tool shows the raw percentage, the penalized percentage and the final mark side by side so the arithmetic is auditable.
Grace days come off the penalized count first: 5 days late under a 2-day grace policy means 3 penalized days. The floor then acts as a safety net — a 40% floor turns a penalized 36 into a final 40, which is exactly how "no late penalty will take your mark below X" policies behave. The cutoff is checked against the raw days late: at a 5-day cutoff, day 5 is accepted and day 6 is not.
Everything is returned with the policy echoed next to it — per-day rate, grace days, floor and cutoff — so a grader, a student or a syllabus writer can verify each step. Disputes about late marks are usually disputes about which clause applies when; showing the whole chain removes the ambiguity.