Unfortunately, none of these solutions really apply to my game, although Marian's comment about getting to work late could be close, but I've had sims get to work late that haven't had this issue (in fact, 99% of the time my Sims are normally 15-30min late). I usually drop "work hard" to "normal" when I see the checkmark, since I don't see the point in pushing her when she has a slam-dunk. Also, there are times when "work hard" isn't even a factor because my Sim only needed like 2 RL minutes to gain the checkmark as they were so close to it originally (such as when the blasted promotion fails). Tjtemple did a test run with a Sim who had my Sim's same traits and hasn't had a problem getting promoted up to level 4, so it really does seem like this is a bug (I'm going to check whether there's a thread in the help section about this so others will know and I don't keep hijacking this thread). Thanks everyone for being so quick to help and try and find a solution, I'm just going to have to wait and hope the next patch undoes the damage!
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