The lessons learned about bargaining in an open Saudi market, while never leaving the USA

I supervised my first 2 Master's theses. One was unbelievably good, the other not so much.
The first student only needed 4 or 5 office visits and two drafts of the thesis before he was done. His public presentation was better than anything I could do. Needless to say, he was immediately snatched up into a great company.
The other student started her work over a year earlier, burned through two other advisors, and needed an inordinate amount of my effort to get the thing written. She made no changes to the first or second draft, even when I had asked her to do so. I revised her thesis twice within 24 hours, both times suggesting significant changes. The day of the deadline, she came into my office begging for my approval. My children were there. She begged and I said no, she pleaded, I said no. Finally she told me that she was going to be deported and essentially tortured because she had not finished her thesis in the time allotted her by her scholarship. I signed the approval form on the condition that she would revise the thesis according to my standards within the week. She needed two more signatures, but was unable to get them. In the end, we found an exit strategy for her that had a later deadline.
It was an embarassment to me. The most hurtful was to see the confusion in son E.'s eyes when he looked up at me after hearing her pleading, understanding my argument to uphold my standards, and watching me cave to a bastardized solution with my signature. He simply said "You signed it? Why? She was wrong." I felt less than the dust of the earth. I made a committment that day that I would never relax my standards, agree to an insufficient compromise, or in any other way reduce the amount of respect that my children would have for me. I learned a lot about negotiating and defending standards through the eyes of my son.
I later learned that she was in no danger, and only needed to graduate because she would have had to return home rather than be allowed to stay on a different type of visa. If I could repeat that day, I would. I learned a lot. I made significant changes to my advising strategy, but if I disclosed them, you would probably accuse me of being xenophobic. Maybe most importantly, I never want to bargain with a Saudi ever again.