Some classmates treat group projects like a free ride, unaware that it may come with a price.

So, what would you do if your lab partner stopped showing up, dodged every task, and expected you to do all the work just so he could pass next year? Would you just play along and let him get away with it? Or would you quietly set him up for failure?

In the following story, one college student finds himself in this situation and chooses the latter. Here’s how it all played out.

Use me for a good grade? Fail and pay extra

A few years ago, I was studying for 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, which 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.

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.

In the beginning, he played along and just did the work.

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

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, he caught on to what the guy was up to.

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.

For 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.

When his partner found out the truth, he was shocked.

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, as if 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!!”

In the end, the guy wasted a lot of money on the class.

You cannot make this up. No denial, no apology, no sense of irony, just shock that I could be “so evil.” Never spoke to him again.

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

The thing is, at my (European) university, you pay more each time you retake a class after failing. So his little ploy to “waste” a year getting me to pass the “lab reports” for him ended up costing him a few thousand Euros.

Wow! People like that are so ridiculous.

Let’s check out how the folks over at Reddit feel about what happened.

For real.

Here’s an interesting thought.

For this person, the guy had a lot of audacity.

This reader got sick of stuff like this in high school.

He handled this well. It would be so unfair to let that guy get away with cheating.

If you liked that story, check out this post about an oblivious CEO who tells a web developer to “act his wage”… and it results in 30% of the workforce being laid off.