Even in the internet era. In high school I often just renamed some random file to a .doc extension and sent that in. No teacher ever had any idea. I'd just play dumb that I had a bad computer.

I worked for a business that sold videos burned to very cheap blank DVDs, for a pretty high price. We tested them onsite, and had about a 20% failure rate (they cheaped out on the equipment, too) and the passing discs wouldn't work for about a third of customers anyway. I think those discs delaminate after a few years.