My sympathies
Last night at dinner, my cousin (well, my mother’s first cousin, my second cousin, but she’s very close to my grandmother), who is a professor in art history (or something — she’s actually got an MA, not a PhD, but she teaches and curates and goes off to Venice lots, having cleverly designed her research specialty as “Canadians painting in Venice”) started talking about how her students tried to get out of exams, or handing papers in late.
Her most original excuse was that a student couldn’t take an exam because she had to have an abortion that day; her worst liar was the student who forgot that his grandmother also had died a year ago, for a different one of her courses. But the best was a colleague of hers (a grad student, 2nd year of teaching), who for the first time ever got “my grandmother died” excuses (6 of them) and not only accepted the excuse but sent condolence notes to the students.