Although service learning provides unparalleled real world experiential student learning opportunities and benefits to four major constituencies--student, faculty, community and institution, it takes place in an uncontrolled environment introducing uncertainty into the instructional process. Faculty might avoid this valuable approach to instruction seeing the uncertainty as additional risk that jeopardizes a major desirable outcome, student learning. This paper provides evidence that a major disruptive event, in this case the client quitting the project before the end of the course, does not limit the student learning levels achieved. The Plato's taxonomy levels of learning are used in a grounded theory approach to gauge learning achieved based on students' reflective papers from two service learning project classes where one client quits during the semester. Effective strategies to manage this major challenge inherent in experiential service learning are presented.