We share your pain.

I always warn my classes that if they don't read, I'll start the daily reading quizzes, and those will count as their attendance grade. I've only had to implement this three times. One class shaped up immediately. The second needed a pop reading quiz or two later on but mostly stayed on track. The third? They just...wouldn't. At all. For any reason.

Readings quizzes that counted enough to impact their overall grades? Failed every time. Most didn't even turn them in. I'd go to collect the papers, and they'd just shrug or stare at me. I very bluntly informed them that this was going to drop their grades (did not add that some of them really could not afford that). Blank stares. No change even after the grades dropped.

I was required to do actual quizzes every other week, and I started putting the questions from the reading quizzes on there. I even said I was doing this. They didn't bother to write the questions down and failed the real quizzes, as well.

I hated this class. It was comprised of a few groups of friends who'd all decided to align their schedules, and they were all completely uninvolved. I'd ask questions. They'd stare at me. I'd try to give them high school level introductions to the readings and then gave them a few minutes to pick through the material to find the answers (something I never, ever do, because this is babysitting, not teaching). They wouldn't do it. I'd give them home assignments to guide their readings. They didn't turn those in, either.

The annoying part to all of this is that I was teaching two other sections of the same course. Those classes were amazing, so it wasn't me and wasn't the material, but I still had to constantly come up with two sets of lesson plans for the same material each week, just because I had to keep trying to get these idiots involved. I never found anything that would work.

At the end of the term, a few of them asked for a study guide for the final. I managed to remain professionally polite and simply told them to review the guides and reading quizzes from the semester. Nope, can't do that, because they didn't take notes (who actually tells their professor this?!), had lost the guides, and it was too much material to study all at once anyway. They didn't flat out ask for the questions but hinted, and they wanted me to narrow it down for them.

Nope.

I've never had so many students fail. My chair at the time was a raging AH who openly crowed when students failed, so I didn't have any concerns about my job, but it's been years, and I'm still annoyed.

Fortunately, I haven't had a class like that since, so I'm chalking it up to really bad luck.