compulsory assignment

Since Niall had ingeniously managed to pay off her early childhood and educational indebtedness to Central Worlds, they had been free agents, able to take jobs that interested them, not compulsory assignments.

That relationship can be affected if the scale or seriousness of a student's compulsory assignments (knowledge of the literature, a capacity for critique and argument, ability to design a project and to collect and analyse data) is in any way diminished.