He ran it up the chain, which is a surprising amount of initiative for a student who could barely be bothered to show up all semester. If he'd put as much effort into my easy-ass class as he did in pretending to be a lawyer after the course was finished, he'd probably have done pretty well.

Our division dean was pretty supportive and was happy to back me if I decided not to change his grade, but also strongly advised that I could be in for a lot of bullshit. We both agreed that this dummy, at the very least, did intend to send his paper to me when he actually sent it to himself. And apparently I put myself at risk because I accepted his friend (the one he was "collaborating" with on his papers) at seven minutes after the deadline I gave them both. That detail turned out to be way more important to her than I expected. I noted his friend's late submission with an eyeroll and a "close enough" because it arrived while I was at my other job and there wasn't any real difference in how much of a pain it was if it arrived at 7:00pm or 7:07pm.

Her view was mostly informed by wanting this guy out of both of our hair. She admitted there's a real difference between me accepting a submission seven minutes late and me not accepting a submission that somebody only INTENDED to submit seven minutes late. But that if he kept running it up the chain, I'd probably have to explain that difference over and over again to people who were increasingly unsympathetic.

So, I graded his (predictably terrible) work and he got a "C" instead of a "D". This is going to sound weak, but I'm actually fine doing that because my boss more or less told me to as long as I didn't do it because the kid told me to. I was super worried that I was going to crack on this, so getting highroaded is preferable.

And yes, I have now officially re-written my "late work" policy. Any future doofuses that need me to be generous because of real life circumstances out of their control may end up getting the shaft because this dummy couldn't figure out how to send an email. Hooray.