‘Dog ate it’ and other excuses Indian students use to avoid homework, reveals survey

While many of the students claimed submitting their assignments on time, around 49 per cent have admitted that they were not able to do so and had to use an excuse for the same.

2 min readJul 10, 2019 07:00 AM IST First published on: Jul 10, 2019 at 07:00 AM IST

Students have a bittersweet relationship with homework. (Source: Thinkstock)

If you’re wondering why your child is not keen on completing their homework, you’re not alone! A survey has found that while a good number of students insisted on having never used an excuse, there were others who admitted to using excuses including ‘lost the homework’ or ‘technological difficulties’ (18.7 per cent), ‘lack of time’, ‘personal injury’ (14.6 per cent), ‘headache’, ‘forgot the homework’, ‘sick child/relative’ (14.1 per cent), ‘undisclosed family emergency’ (9.8 per cent), or even the hilarious ‘dog ate my homework’ (4 per cent). Students usually strive for reasons that come across as genuine and convincing, when considering an excuse.

About 906 responses were about the craziest reasons that students got away with, revealed a release from Brainly, such as ‘forgot about it’ (43.3 per cent), ‘someone stole it out of my backpack’ (13.1 per cent), ‘Fever, lack of time, lost it, I told the truth, no excuses, spilled ink on it etc (8.2 per cent), ‘Spilled coffee and ruined it’ (8.2 per cent), ‘laptop crashed’ (6.1 per cent), ‘dog ate it’ (5.3 per cent), ‘I turned it into a different class’ (4.4 per cent), ‘child ate it’ (4.1 per cent), ‘a wind gust blew it out of my hands’ (4 per cent), ‘it was lost in a fire’ (3.4 per cent).