Looking for extra credit?
I'm afraid this is something I just never offer. Please read on - you'll see why.
There are three reasons. One is pedagogical, one is philosophical, and one is moral. First, I believe "extra credit" is pretty much a relic from high-school, something that has no real place in college. Instead of doing something extra, you need to focus on the content of my courses and be evaluated against their understanding and mastery of that content. That's how the world works for most people, and quite often, unfortunately, it is not even that fair. I just don't think it does you any service for me to extend an artifact of childhood into the adult world.
Second, if you look up "extra" in the dictionary, as an adjective it means more or less "in addition to." If you are short on points, especially because of missing assignments or poor performance, the idea of "extra credit" is without meaning. For credit to be "extra" (and I'm consulting Webster's College Edition of the New World Dictionary on this one), it has to be in addition to whatever is in question. If you don't have that something, which in most cases amounts to either the basic skills necessary to get the grade you want in the class or the number of points you need in order to get that grade, it doesn't make any sense to add something to the task at hand. It would be like adding weight to a barbell you already can't lift.
Now, if you're talking about the prefix "extra," what you mean is "outside of." This, I think, is the kind of thing most students are after (book reports, additional projects, etc.). In the true sense of the word though, such work and the credit it might earn amount to "extraneous credit" rather than "extra credit." I don't think this is a good idea either. It cheapens the efforts of those who have succeeded in mastering the objectives of the course, and it creates tasks and expectations that lead away from those objectives.
A somewhat selfish addition to this third reason is that such "extraneous credit" creates extraneous work for me. Why should I work harder for students who, in most cases, are not working hard enough for themselves? It wouldn't bother me if I thought it would help them learn the material, but my experience has been that most students who ask for "extra credit" usually do just as poorly on it as they have on the basic requirements of the course. Besides, if doing it allows them to pass the course instead of fail it, they have, in my view, done so illegitimately.
So... what students usually want in "extra credit" does not, in fact, amount to extra credit at all. Rather, it amounts to credit for something other than what the course is designed to teach. This idea is particularly irksome when it gives lazy, disinterested, or habitually absent students the chance to improve their grades. I don't necessarily mean you here, but how are the students who have fulfilled the requirements of the course going to feel? How am I going to feel? How is it going to reflect on the value of an NGCSU diploma? Certainly you can see why making such an opportunity available would bother a teaching professional with integrity. And since I can't give some students such a chance while leaving others out, I just don't do it for anybody. Period. So much for morality.
Occasionally, however, I do make opportunities available that allow people to make up for lost points (rather than adding something extraneous to them). Such opportunities will provide either an opportunity to enhance the material at hand or offer an opportunity to review it without actually distracting from it. Even then it is difficult to make such opportunities available to everyone, so I don't do it very often.