There’s a big difference between being understanding and being taken advantage of.

What would you do if your thesis partner kept promising to pull her weight but never followed through, not for weeks but for months? Would you keep covering for her? Or would you finally draw the line, even if it meant she wouldn’t graduate?

In the following story, one college student deals with this very situation and opts for the latter. Here’s how it all played out.

AITA for requesting to remove my thesis partner from our research, which may cause her not to graduate?

I (M) am in a college course with only 8 people, so we’re all pretty close.

For our thesis, we were assigned to work in pairs, and I got partnered with a woman I’ve already worked with on several school projects before.

She tends to do things last-minute, but she usually does them, so I wasn’t thrilled but figured we’d manage.

That changed quickly.

It’s supposed to be a team project, but she wasn’t doing her part.

We both work night shifts, but she also has a kid. I get that, and I’ve really tried to be understanding. But I still managed to interview her three times over three months, while she was constantly unavailable.

When it came time to transcribe the interviews (each an hour long), we split the work, but she didn’t do any of hers. I ended up doing all of it just to keep us from falling behind.

Then came encoding, which is the most tedious and time-consuming part of our paper. We split the work again, and for almost a month, I kept bugging her and messaging her to finish her part, and she never did.

After getting no response, he did this part of the project on his own.

I eventually gave up and just did the whole thing myself.

I told our advisor, and they made her pay for the subscription to the software we were using as compensation. But that was the only thing she contributed.

Still trying to be fair, I asked her to handle our thesis defense presentation and script instead. But on the day of the defense, the presentation was unfinished, and I had to fix it myself right there in the room.

She arrived 1.5 hours late, and the script she gave only covered 20 pages for a 45+ slide deck.

After the defense, we were told to redo the encoding and rewrite chapters 3 and 4 separately so we could compare and combine. I started mine right away. She? Still hasn’t done anything.

Frustrated, he wants to turn the project in under his name only.

I’ve been consistently messaging her to ask for updates, to follow up on her encoding, and her write-up, and I just got a “yeah, I’ll do it,” but still nothing.

I constantly see her active on Facebook and posting stories.

Finally, I asked our advisor if I could submit the thesis under my name only, which would mean she won’t graduate.

Now people are telling me I’m being too harsh and should just carry her one last time, but I honestly feel like I’ve carried her through the entire thing already.

AITA?

Wow! It doesn’t seem like she’s pulling her weight at all.

Let’s see what the readers over at Reddit think about the whole thing.

For this person, she’s given him no reason to keep showing kindness.

This reader thinks she should’ve been more upfront.

Here’s a good point.

Joint theses do sound like a bad idea.

According to this reader, the professor is wrong.

This is not his problem.

If you liked this post, you might want to read this story about a teacher who taught the school’s administration a lesson after they made a sick kid take a final exam.