You are being downvoted but you are exactly on point. If some fail they may be bad students, but if the majority of my students fail they're not bad students, it is me who is a bad teacher.

> Of course, the teacher knew this, gave bonus points to the ones who did start in time, and then extended the deadline as he had expected to from the start.

I think what he meant is they 'failed' to get it completed on time and it was meant as a teaching lesson.

That wasn't in the original comment.

Failing is a form of learning. Enabling to fail (preferably in a safe way) is very valuable for learning.

Agreed, and the now edited comment illustrates how the teacher made it a safe lesson. That portion wasn't in the comment when I replied, and it sounded more like the teacher simply failed to prepare their students.

"Of course, the teacher knew this, gave bonus points to the ones who did start in time, and then extended the deadline as he had expected to from the start."

That wasn't in the original comment. It has been edited since I replied, which is fine. I do it all the time, sometimes you miss that someone replied during your editing.

Similarly, it's not good teaching practice to trivialize deadlines.

Yeah plenty of time for workplaces to do that for you. I can count on my hand the number of times something has been a hard deadline. This teacher taught a valuable lesson usable for the rest of the student's carreers and "the most students shouldn't fail mentality" has led to professors I know personally questioning the caliber of student they are receiving and this is a top 30 program I'm referring to. More people should fail, maybe they'd start treating things seriously and the problem of underqualified technical applicants would resolve itself.