How assignment deadlines and guidelines shape creativity, motivation, and quality: Perspectives from music-technology students

• Near deadlines, creativity shifts from divergent exploration to convergent efficiency. • Motivation fluctuates with task relevance, workload balance, and personal investment. • Guidelines foster psychological safety, enabling risk-taking within defined boundaries. • Structural clarity mitigates ambiguity, fostering motivation through achievable goals. • Subjective creativity definitions (problem-solving vs. experimentation) shape deadline impacts. Educators in creative disciplines face a persistent challenge: balancing structured guidance (e.g., deadlines, guidelines) with the flexibility necessary for fostering originality. This study investigates how tertiary music and music-technology students perceive the impact of deadlines and structural guidelines on their creativity, motivation, and work quality. Employing a qualitative design with open-ended surveys (n = 35), we analyzed 9,355 words of student responses through grounded theory, supplemented by post-hoc quantitative categorization. Findings reveal that 74% of students associated deadlines with heightened motivation, yet their effects on creativity were polarized: 46% reported enhanced focus, while 31% cited constrained exploration. Structural guidelines were similarly divisive, viewed as clarifying (63%) or restrictive (34%). Crucially, students’ subjective definitions of creativity and motivation mediated these outcomes—those framing creativity as problem-solving thrived under deadlines, while proponents of unrestricted experimentation found them stifling. Motivation rooted in personal investment drove sustained effort, whereas external pressure led to stress-driven compliance. Grounded theory analysis uncovered an interconnected academic ecosystem, where task type, workload, and emotional states dynamically shaped engagement. The study advocates for structured uncertainty in pedagogy—designing adaptable frameworks that harmonize accountability with artistic autonomy. By centering student voices, this research underscores the need for educators to align constraints with learners’ evolving conceptualizations of creativity, ensuring pedagogical structures catalyze rather than inhibit creativity.