1. Do your homework.  Even when it’s not required, do it anyway.  Believe it or not, teachers don’t assign homework as a way to drive you crazy and deprive you of quality pizza-and-ice-cream time.

2. Know, understand, and follow the directions.  If your professor provided written instructions, keep them and refer to them frequently – and check the completed assignment one last time against the instructions before you turn it in.  If your professor provided oral instructions, write them down.  If you think you might have missed something, check it out during office hours (follow that etiquette!).  There are a few ways to aggravate a professor worse than failing to follow simple clear directions – but I can’t think of what they are right now.

3. Turn it in on time.  You should actually try to have it done the day before it’s due (a strange concept to many college students, apparently).   That way, you can still have a friend deliver the homework on time even if you have some kind of emergency the next day.  

4. If you have a legitimate emergency (oversleeping because you were up all night finishing the assignment doesn’t count), contact the instructor right away.  Follow the usual protocol for identifying yourself, then explain the situation and find out what, if anything, you should do.  Remember that dealing with late work is a major headache for instructors, especially if it’s a large class, so be polite and courteous instead of whiney and demanding.  

5. Identify yourself.  In some prominent location indicate your name, student ID number, the date of the assignment, the course name and number, and the professor’s name.  It sounds crazy, but this comes in very useful when you’re trying to find your paper in the middle of the hurricane that is your room during finals week.  It also helps the professor find your paper in the middle of the hurricane that is her office during finals week.

6. Follow up.  Be sure to get the homework back from the instructor (yes, there are students who will regularly fail to do this – they also regularly fail other things . . .).  Study it to find out what you need to work on (believe it or not, that’s the whole point behind homework).  If you don’t understand something, hit those office hours!

7. Be sure you understand your score or grade.  If you don’t, it’s office hour time again.  You can generally get away with politely pointing out an instructor’s arithmetic mistakes.  You can also generally get away with politely asking for an explanation of why an answer you think is correct is incorrect (in fact, this is an important thing to do to avoid making the same mistake on the next assignment).  It’s a bad idea to quibble over semantics and argue over half-points (you’d be surprised at how many additional points can be found to take off at other places), and an even worse idea to tell the instructor that you’re right and she’s wrong.