Large-Scale Student Data Reveal Sociodemographic Gaps in Procrastination Behavior

University students have to manage complex and demanding schedules to keep up with coursework across multiple classes while navigating formative personal, cultural, and financial events. Procrastination, the act of deferring study effort until the task deadline, is therefore a prevalent phenomenon, but whether it is more common among historically disadvantaged students is unknown. If systematic differences in procrastination behavior exist across sociodemographic groups, they may also contribute to achievement gaps, considering that procrastination is largely negatively associated with academic performance in prior research. We therefore investigate these questions in the context of assignment submission using campus-wide learning management system (LMS) data from a large U.S. research university. We analyze 2,631,893 submission records by 25,659 students across 2,153 courses and propose a context-agnostic procrastination score for each student in each course based on their assignment submission times relative to classmates. Based on this procrastination score, we find significantly higher levels of procrastination behavior among males, racial minorities, and first-generation college students than their peers. However, these differences only explain performance gaps to a very limited extent and the negative association between procrastination behavior and performance remains relatively stable across student groups. This large-scale behavioral study advances the understanding of academic procrastination through an equity lens and informs the development of scalable interventions to mitigate the negative effects of procrastination.