Or being part of a culture where "sleep is for the weak".
Certainly folks at the bottom of the economic ladder are sleep deprived due to needing to work multiple jobs and take care of kids. But there are a lot of high-status communities that put a positive value on sleep deprivation. I hear from multiple sources that this is true in medicine. I know from experience that this is true at MIT.
Those cultures need to change. There is no good reason for an introductory computer architecture class to make its assignments due at 6am.
When I was an undergraduate TA in Computational Physics, we had a deadline of Monday 8am, which arised from a technicality: At Monday 8am, a cron job would download the submissions from the designated mailbox, and print them, so that we could pick them up for grading when we came into the office that morning.
You're absolutely right though. It would be more sensible to have the cronjob run at Sunday 8pm instead, given that nobody is in the office until Monday morning anyway.
Certainly folks at the bottom of the economic ladder are sleep deprived due to needing to work multiple jobs and take care of kids. But there are a lot of high-status communities that put a positive value on sleep deprivation. I hear from multiple sources that this is true in medicine. I know from experience that this is true at MIT.
Those cultures need to change. There is no good reason for an introductory computer architecture class to make its assignments due at 6am.