My sense of relief was comical and fleeting. It was replaced by anger. How was it possible that most of the students in the class did worse than I? What an absolute waste to subject us all to such nonsense.
I heard a story from an academic coordinator once, of an instructor who had been hired for a required CS computer architecture class because he was a friend of the department chairman. He was an electrical engineer, which made some sense, but then students started showing up in the coordinator's office crying and trying to drop the class well after the last drop date. It seemed he thought CS undergraduates were supposed to be the same as electrical engineering grad students, and wanted to fail the entire class. (He did not, nor did he get hired for further classes. After many years, though, his friend was the department chairman again and hired him as a tenured professor and the department's external relations coordinator. This is part of the reason I did not go into academia.)
Many instructors are just stinking bad. Many aren't, and manage to tie together both interesting lectures and more active assignments. But the bad ones do leave marks.
Really helped to shape my perception that grades are meaningless and ultimately political.
That wouldn't really be fair to the students who care about their GPAs, though.
You know it's the professor themselves that adjusts the grades? Of course the professor wouldn't fail the class if, as you suggest, it would make the professor look "useless".
There's incentive to keep yourself employed however useless, bloated or out of time what you're teaching is.
I'm not sure how the school plan is evaluated in different places, but i feel like for example religion in a country like Sweden where most people don't believe in it[1] should be brought down to make space for something Swedes think is important.