In an undergraduate legal and ethical environment of business classes, the authors teach business students how to apply legal rules and ethical principles to problems that arise in business. Teaching the distinction between independent contractors and employees offers a rich, timely opportunity to improve students' critical thinking and communication skills. In a series of scaffolded assignments, culminating in a written project, students apply the current legal standards to three business scenarios chosen to illustrate the complexity of this classification under Department of Labor (DOL) guidelines issued in July 2015, Internal Revenue Service (IRS) rules, and recent decisions from the U.S. courts of appeals. The three exercises explained in this article can easily be accomplished in two separate in-class sessions of approximately thirty minutes each, plus a short, out-of-class written assignment.