[majewsky]

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.