Group projects are the bane of conscientious students everywhere – and music to the ears of those who like to get good grades without pulling their weight.
OP was assigned a group project in a class they had little interest in and that didn’t really contribute to their major, besides, so they were less than thrilled.
This happened about 12 years ago while I was studying Aeronautical Engineering. Due to some money-grubbing legislation tactics, most who have gone to college know about the unnecessary courses that are tacked onto the degrees in order to graduate.
One of those courses for my degree was a Business class (seriously, you’d think these guys would understand that most Engineers don’t do the business side of things).
Thankfully, we had a teacher who was understanding of the fact that many of us in the class were bored out of our minds.
I’ll admit to having always been a geek/nerd who loved making good grades. If I don’t understand something, I run at it hard to try to change that.
This class stumped me for quite some time and then a nightmare of a project was announced: one worth 50% of our grades.
Still, with a desire to keep a good GPA at the wheel, they were prepared to do the work.
A fact that did not escape the attention of a couple of their group members, who immediately dumped their portion of the work.
The school was a small one, the class a little more than 30 people, and I was assigned to work with three people I knew from other classes. We had problems straight away.
Two of the people remembered me from a Calculus class that they barely passed as the person who sailed easily through and decided to dump their portion of the work on me straight away, knowing I wouldn’t allow myself to fail.
They were right.
A fourth member tried their best to help but soon felt bogged down by the extra work as well.
At first my other group member tried to pick up the slack as well, pulling hard to do a difficult project in a subject we barely understood. I’ll admit she was a trouper.
Unfortunately, she was also someone easily manipulated and our two slacking group members began applying pressure during the semester for her to take the work and allow them to present it.
When it came time to present the project OP was sick. The slacker group members took credit for the whole thing and even went so far as to tell the professor OP was the one who hadn’t done anything.
The day of the project finally comes and I’m sick as a dog, pretty much quarantined in the clinic due to bronchitis. I managed to send a message to the teacher.
The two slackers manage to wrangle the presentation from the girl who worked with me and presented it to the class, declaring that they had done all of the work and I was skipping class because they had told me that they were going to tell the teacher what happened.
They must have forgotten, however, that they had the only copy of the report that was a portion of the grade.
My initial grade was an F. I was beyond livid until I realized something important: part of the project involved a written report, of which, I held the only copy since I was the one to type it up.
Cue the revenge: privately I went to the teacher with my notes and the report in order to get the grade I earned and to get him in on the plot. He agreed since it seemed fun and he planned to fail them anyway for academic dishonesty.
Publicly, there was no report.
When they refused to give it up they hassled him for weeks – not realizing they were documenting all of the harassment.
The classmates that had attempted to take all the credit began to approach me, first demanding the report. Most of the time, my response was, “But I didn’t do any work!” in a sickly sweet voice.
Next they attempted to act all buddy-buddy, trying to convince me that it had all been a joke and promising that they’d tell the professor that I had done some work, giving me some credit so that I had the possibility to pass. This was met with stony silence on most occasions before I told them that I’d rather fail than let them pass.
Things escalated after that to include the door of my dorm room being rapped on at odd hours of the night, shoving, and them stealing my backpack and notebooks in order to try to find the report themselves.
One of them even asked my roommate to let them search for a report I had written and forgotten for our group (didn’t have her as my roommate the following semester).
In the end, the professor gave OP a passable grade and not only failed the slackers, but reported them to administration, too.
Things finally came to a head on the last week of classes. I had held out on them for a month, not telling any of my group mates what I had done and enough time had elapsed that even if they were to turn in the report now, it would be so late that they’d still have failed. T
hey hadn’t even attempted to do the report themselves and the girl who had worked with me was in hysterics over the very real possibility of failing the class. It was what the teacher and I had been waiting for and he finally decided to return the reports.
The two slackers glared daggers at me as the teacher returned the report of every other group in the class before stopping in front of them. He was holding what looked to be one extra report and they were immediately looking hopeful. He set a single sheet of paper on one of their desks before moving to the desk of the girl who had worked along with me and set the report on her desk.
“I had to dock some points for dishonesty, but you and your partner did decently,” he stated before moving on.
My partner realized what I had done. We only got an 82 on our project, but it was far better than the 0 that our ex-group mates received.
They ended up being expelled.
I had been carefully documenting the harassment that the two slackers had put me through and ensured several witnesses saw some of what they did.
Two days after being informed that they were failing, the pair had a new problem: I gave the evidence to the administration of our school and the teacher reported the academic dishonesty.
The administration did a bit more digging and found that the pair had been making trouble for some time and a number of students reported similar problems of having their work stolen.
The slackers were expelled.
Did OP go too far? I bet Reddit has some thoughts!
This person wishes they’d thought of something like this.
Always be the one to type the report.
Some people’s stories don’t have happy endings.
This person says OP is the hero we all need.
It’s surprising…but maybe it shouldn’t be.
It’s a tale as old as time.
I, too, want to give OP a virtual pat on the back.