The time taken to submit an exam could influence the student's grades, as this would reflect, in part, the students' prior planning and preparation for the subject, but also their internal characteristics. In this way, knowing what students are like inside and their potential existing behavior models, can lead to improving the teacher's understanding and treatment of them.

In this vein, literature establishes that the mentality with which a person approaches its tasks can significantly affect the speed and efficiency with which they complete them. In the world population, there is a predominance of people with a fixed mindset, who show greater slowness due to the fear of failure and the avoidance of challenges, thus procrastinating their execution, and considering that their skills, intelligence and talent are innate and immutable characteristics that cannot be improved; in contrast to people with a growth mindset, who believe that these aspects can be developed, and that is why they seek to learn, progress and perform their tasks each day better, being very persistent and obtaining a greater motivation for learning. In the educational field, this would mean that these students with a fixed mindset would take longer to answer the questions asked, postponing their answers and delaying the moment of delivery until the end of the established time. Something that in Spain would be further reinforced by the effect that the educational system has on our marked aversion to risk, accentuating this type of mentality in students. This situation is corroborated in the present study, which analyses the delivery behavior and grade obtained by 163 students within the subject ‘Introduction to Business Management Studies’ at the Spanish educational center ‘EDEM-Business School’. Thus, in the first call, 61% of the students handed in their exams during the last 20 minutes; a figure very similar to the 55% obtained in the second call.

However, literature has not found significant differences between a type of fixed or growth mindset among the best and the worst students. That is to say, both good and not-so-good students could indistinctly develop the two types of mindsets. Or, in other words, there will be good students both in the first time slots (due to good students with growth mindset) and in the last ones (due in this case to good students with fixed mindset). Something that is corroborated in our analysis by obtaining the best average grades in the first delivery time slots (+12%), as well as in the last ones (+4%).

To deepen the analysis and better understand students’ needs, the time slot where the lowest average grades were obtained in each call was analyzed, observing a transfer from the second time slot to the penultimate one between the first and second call. This could be the natural consequence of grouping together in this second call the less capable students who were not able to pass the subject in the first call. But it would also give us light about a variation in the delivery behavior of this type of students, being reluctant or “embarrassed” to show their lack of study in the first call, waiting for the first students to hand in their exams to do it themselves. However, in the second call they would show a radically different and much more strategic behavior, waiting almost until the end of the time to hand in their exams, trying in some way to “pretend” to have a certain preparation or study that in reality does not exist.

Keywords: Delivery time, Fixed and growth mindset, Top students, Motivation, Improvement, Qualification.