“They do the bare minimum and coast”

Coasting is usually an accurate reading of the room. Students learn what finished means from what gets accepted, and if three lines earn the same tick as a page of hard thinking, the extra thinking has no visible return. The minimum is also the safe bet: real effort can fail in front of everyone, while a bare pass cannot. And on a heavy marking week you take the three lines and move on, which quietly confirms the going rate. Nobody is being lazy in any deep sense. They have judged what the task really requires and they are meeting it.

It holds because it is a quiet truce. Coasting students hand something in and cause no trouble, so your attention goes to the students producing nothing at all, and challenging work that is technically fine can feel petty. Coasting protects the student too. As long as they never really try, a poor result says nothing about them. The techniques below break the truce from three directions: some raise what counts as finished, some make early success likely enough that effort feels worth risking, and some notice effort precisely when it appears.