A bunch of students signed up for a boat building class and expressed enthusiasm for building boats. Over the course of three months all of them built boats. Some were leaky, some were pretty tippy, but they were all boats and they all floated to some extent.
Except this student. This student skipped all the boat building instruction sessions, got mad at other boat builders for not telling them everything they learned every day for over a month, didn't respond to emails about boat-building class, and didn't show up at the meeting scheduled two months earlier to show their finished boat.
A week later, after the instructor had given up on them they emailed and said they wanted to show their boat, now. The instructor reluctantly agreed. They complained repeatedly about having to do the entire boat building project by themselves and about their fellow boat builders, who failed to send them the notes from the dozen or so instruction sessions they missed.
Eventually the student pulled out of their shoulder bag six twigs scotch-taped to an old calculator and a broken umbrella.
Now they are very upset that I wrote "this is not a good boat and it will not float" on their evaluation. They "just can't understand" why I didn't write "this is a good boat." They don't feel that my evaluation reflects the effort they put into building their boat.
[I texted this to my partner to explain what was happening with a student appealing their grade in a class that was heavily structured around a semester-long research project. She suggested I show this to the interwebs.]