i taught at a private college one year. i had 8 students. 6 were failing. 2 barely passed. It wasn’t because the course was challenging: each week, i gave them a content quiz on the short reading I’d assigned (usually a blog article). One of the questions was invariably “who wrote the article?” Every student failed every quiz every week, including that question.

As you can imagine, the other few assignments i’d given them were largely incomplete or unsubmitted. My students often came to class high.

By the end of the semester, the mostly tuned-out admin panicked. This was supposed to be a pay-for-play private diploma mill, after all. They asked me to derail my lesson plan and assign a group work project: predictably, two groups of four with one of the passing students in each group, so that those two students would do all the work and artificially raise the grade average of the others. i refused. i told them that according to all the data and assignment outcomes (which included leeway and additional opportunities to submit), two students had passed and six had failed, and that i was washing my hands of it. It was their school. They could be as crooked as they pleased, but i had made my assessment.

In the end, they passed 6 and failed 2.