Wow, this one's giving me flashbacks. Back when I was in grad school I taught freshman composition. The final assignment was a five-page research paper. Students had the freedom to pick their topics, though I had to approve them.
One female student chose home schooling. Not surprisingly she had been home schooled prior to college. I approved the topic, but I warned her that I didn't want it to be a self-affirmation piece where she went on about how she personally benefitted from home schooling nor did I want it to read like a sermon on how morally corrupt the public school system is. I told her I expected detailed research about the numbers of kids being home schooled and how they perform when they enter the formal education system at the collegiate level. I practically knocked myself over stressing that this was a research paper and not a statement of her personal religious beliefs and that she was getting an F- if she handed me a statement of her personal religious beliefs.
Quick background, I'd urged her to the drop the course earlier in the semester. She was functionally illiterate, had missed or botched every assignment I'd given and needed an A on the final paper in order to pass the course. I urged her to get remedial tutoring so that she could stay in college. Smiling, she always smiled, she ignored me.
Also, I had students submitting their drafts, outlines and thesis statements to me during the writing process. She never once submitted these to me, even when it was a requirement listed on the syllabus. I pulled her aside after class twice and told her that it didn't bode well for her that she was missing these deadlines and that she stood a much better chance of getting the grade she needed to pass the course if I had the chance to make sure she was on the right track prior to the final submission. She smiled.
Anyway, you can guess what I got, a rambling, often incoherent tract about her personal experiences being home schooled and about her personal views on religion. Even if I had assigned that to her, she'd have gotten an F because it was so poorly written (she didn't know basic subject-verb agreement) and lacked even so much as the germ of well-considered point of view. She did no research, though she did invent a few numbers and insist that everyone who got home schooled was a better student than those who weren't.
She got her F on the paper and F for the course. Then she and her parents turned up in the college president's office two days later insisting I'd infringed on her religious freedoms. We set up a meeting for the next day with a bunch of high-level muckety-mucks. I came loaded for bear. I went to her other professors and discovered she was failing every course she'd taken. I also had a portfolio of her writing over the semester. The research paper had been copied and sent to everyone in the meeting. The long and short of it was that I got a big pat on the back and she got put on academic probation (one semester later she got expelled).