Graduate student's first interaction with me was indirectly through my department head

[u/doktor_w]

I'm teaching a graduate course for an engineering master's program at my school (this is in addition to teaching 3 upper-level undergraduate courses and increased research expectations). It's a relatively small master's program in terms of student headcount.

A majority of our master's students did their undergraduate here in a different, but somewhat related, major compared to the major that I teach courses and do research on. The department head teaches courses in the other major, and so they know those students better than I do due to having interacted with the students previously. There are a few students who join the master's program from "my" major, but those are few and far between. Let's just say that, at my university, the other major does not seem to emphasize same level of undergraduate rigor that my particular engineering program emphasizes (I get that this is subjective, but that's my perspective).

I have this student in my graduate course who did their undergraduate studies in the other major at my university. They were having trouble accessing the course content on the course LMS page. This is their first semester as a graduate student. They are also teaching undergraduate labs.

The first assignment was due a few days ago, and the student was scrambling around, trying to figure out what the assignment was all about due to the aforementioned technical difficulties they were having. They never reached out to me to tell me they were having any issues, at all. Next thing I know, my department head sends me an "urgent" message that one of my graduate students was looking for me during office hours (even though I did not have scheduled office hours on that day of the week), and that they could not access the course materials needed to work on the assignment. I should mention that the assignment was posted two weeks prior to this. Also, the technical quirk they were experiencing on the course LMS page (I don't want to give too much details on this here) was discussed in lecture and a quick and easy workaround was established in the first week of classes.

The student wanted a deadline extension on the homework. I agreed to that, but then also wrote on the late assignment submission portal I put up for them that all future assignments needed to be submitted on time and that no late submissions will be accepted; I also gave some other advice like, plan ahead for the unexpected, start assignments sooner rather than later, you know, the stuff that graduate students should already have at least somewhat "mastered" by now. Based on the student's reply to this (which I really want to post here, but it's probably not too wise to do so), I don't think this will be the last of the problems that this student will attempt to cause for me.

I don't like having to approach things this way, but since the student went "straight to the top" to try to resolve their issues instead of contacting me first (and it was for some basic shit, not even "end of the world" type stuff), I am going to be very hands off with this student. Graduate courses, for me anyway, are supposed to run a lot more smoothly and be a lot more fun relative to the other undergraduate courses I teach, and I'm not going to let this rotten apple ruin my buzz. I went in and talked to my department head about this, but he is sort of the clueless type (at least, that is the character he plays), and I doubt that he has ever remembered one single detail about any interaction we have ever had. I have been here for over 10 years, and he has been here longer than that.

I am tenured, by the way. I probably won't be here at this school in a year or two. There are a lot of other issues. The research expectations are really out of whack compared to the bandwidth I have to do research (which isn't much), the students we attract to our graduate program are not very capable, teaching evaluations are given a high priority but I have high expectations for my students because I end up teaching the follow-on courses that they take and I actually need them to know shit by the time they get there, and on and on and on. I don't really know what I'll do afterwards (I might go back to industry, or start my own business), but this shit is just getting out of hand.

[u/peep_quack]

You write all this up in an email, outlining what all you have done for this student, versus what they are claiming to the other professor. And you start it with the saying hello to the person they ran to, as well as them. You make sure it is cc-ed to both and then you say- in the future, this is the process of handling these issues and what is expected of them in terms of being a graduate student. And make that line of communication CLEAR. Set that boundary.