So, weren't the students illegally drunk?

Also, this report, from an AP article of December 5, 1999, gets something wrong that many other sources do too.  The blood-alcohol content (BAC) is expressed in the article as "0.08," but that's wrong.

The BAC is the ratio of ethyl alcohol to the total volume of blood in the sample.  The "0.08" referred to, when translated into percentage terms, means, of course, 8 percent.

But what they meant is not "0.08" but rather "0.08 percent" (equal to 0.0008), which is wildly different.

Death in uninured humans almost invariably results from a BAC of around 1 part in 200, equal to 0.50 percent, meaning that for each drop of alcohol there are only 199 drops of blood to dilute its toxic effects.  If the article above is to be believed, the student who had a BAC of "four times the 0.08 threshold" was able to survive after drinking six consecutive lethal doses.

That would be 24 times more than legally drunk.