Group projects for school are stressful.

Inevitably some people don’t do their part and ride on the work and talent of their teammates.

And obviously, the people who do the work don’t think that’s fair.

Honestly, teachers don’t seem to be able to process this issue.

The student in this story prevented a lazy classmate from taking credit for the work, though.

Check it out!

Don’t pull your weight? You’ll get cut out of the credits

This happened back in university.

One of my classes had a quarter-long group project that made up most of our final grade.

The professor had check-in deadlines, but we were expected to manage our own timeline.

My group of 4 decided we would all have roles with different responsibilities on top of our writing sections to keep us organized.

The system fails early on.

I want to say the roles were editor, secretary, tech, and leader, but it was something similar.

One guy chose secretary, which had pretty simple jobs: keeping notes from meetings, keeping track of sources, etc.

The problem was that he always found some reason to miss the weekly group meetings, so all his tasks fell to us.

He then blamed us when he missed deadlines, claiming we didn’t tell him when they were.

He would know if he bothered to check the meeting notes where we kept a running timeline.

Technically is was his responsibility to update.

Whatever writing he did contribute was procrastinated garbage and the rest of us would have to scramble to redo his sections.

We spoke with the professor to see if we could switch team members, but it was a small seminar, so no one else was available.

She told us to work it out between ourselves.

I tried to talk to him about it but he always came up with some excuse and nothing changed.

Finals week comes around and as expected, his section was an unfinished mess.

What finally made me snap was so insignificant it sounds silly: he had edited the title page and changed the author order so his name was first.

But she is isn’t going to let him get away with it.

I was the editor, so I would do the last round of proofreading and formatting before turning things in. When I saw his name listed first after I spent most of the night rewriting his part, I lost it.

So the last thing I did before saving and turning in the final report was completely remove his name from the document.

I later realized I should have asked the other 2 group members before doing it, but who hasn’t given into a toxic impulse close to midnight?

My professor eventually contacted me to asked what happened and I just explained that he didn’t contribute, so including his name would be academic dishonesty.

My university was very strict about any kind of cheating or plagiarism, so I knew those were the magic words.

I didn’t get a reply from her, but I know he got a bad grade because he was blowing up our group chat blaming us all.

I ended up blocking his number and thankfully didn’t run into him again.

Here is what folks are saying.

Exactly. I don’t get why we have group projects.

Same!

Very clever!

Haha! I hadn’t heard that one.

I’m sure they were delighted.

Blocking him was also a smart move.

No one needs more drama.

If you liked this post, check out this story about an employee who got revenge on a co-worker who kept grading their work suspiciously low.