If you’re a good student in school, you probably hated group projects because there’s usually one person who ends up doing most of the work, and often, that ends up becoming the person who is most concerned about getting a good grade.

What would you do if your lab partner at school refused to do anything to help.

Would you do all the work yourself, or would you find a way to get revenge on your lab partner?

In today’s story, one student does both of these things.

Let’s see how the story plays out.

Use me for a good grade? Fail and pay extra

A few years ago I was studying a very demanding engineering degree.

In most classes we had two parts that were graded: “lab reports” and a final exam.

We had to pass both to pass the class.

The “lab reports” took an ungodly amount of time to complete that took away from studying for the final.

But if you passed the “lab reports” and failed the final exam, the following year you didn’t have to redo the “lab reports,” just the final exam.

He didn’t have the best lab partner.

For one particular class (that my usual lab partner wasn’t taking) I got paired up with someone I barely knew.

He wasn’t a great student and had failed most of the classes the previous year so I was surprised that he was in this class but whatever.

For the first lab report I ended up doing 98% of the work but at least he showed up some of the time and pretend to help.

I handed it in with both of our names because I didn’t want drama.

After that he never came to class again.

For the next lab report he would only contact me by text and insisted we didn’t have to meet up to do it, to just tell him what part to do.

He realized what his lab partner was doing.

I would tell him, and then he would reply that he didn’t know how to do it.

I gave him progressively smaller and smaller tasks.

The last one was literally to copy an equation from the book into Python, and again he “didn’t know how”.

Then I understood his game plan.

He had no intention of taking the class or studying for the final.

He wanted to use me to pass the “lab report” part of the class so that when he retook the class the following year, he wouldn’t have to do any of it and have time to study for the final.

So I went along with it.

He didn’t tell his lab partner what he was really doing.

For the of the rest of the “lab reports” I would contact him by text and we played this game where I would ask him to “help me” by doing ridiculously simple tasks and he “didn’t know how” and I would just say “oh don’t worry about it I’ve got it.”

And then I would let him know when I handed the report in.

He took me for the biggest doormat in history.

But of course I had already talked to the professor about the situation and I was handing in the reports with only my name on them.

He finally told his lab partner the truth.

I saw him on the last day of class (we had to show up to sign something) and he came over to say hi with a big smile on his face.

I just casually told him “oh just a heads up, the past four reports didn’t have your name on them since I did all the work”.

He was SHOCKED like he had seen evil for the first time in his life.

He literally responded “If you knew I was using you from the beginning, why would you string me along for the entire semester?? That is so rude!!”

You cannot make this up.

No denial, no apology, no sense of irony, just shock that I could be “so evil”.

The lab partner’s plot really backfired.

Never spoke to him again.

I know from friends that he took the class again the following year and failed it, so he dad to take it a third time after that.

The thing is that in my (European) university, you pay more every time you retake a class after you’ve failed.

So his little ploy to “waste” one year to get me to pass the “lab reports” for him ended up costing him a few thousand euros.

This is another example of play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

Let’s see how Reddit reacted to this story.

That horrible lab partner has nobody to blame but himself.

Unfortunately, there are many people like this horrible lab partner who don’t change their ways in the real world.

This person refused to do group projects.

This person was surprised.

You can’t always expect someone to do the work for you.

Most of the time they won’t.

If you liked that post, check out this post about a woman who tracked down a contractor who tried to vanish without a trace.