Group projects in school can be a huge hassle, especially when your partner is not pulling their weight.

So, while issues can come up that make the division of labor inequal, both parties should be contributing throughout the project.

This guy’s project partner ran into some issues so he hired a tutor to redo her work. He then told the professor that she didn’t contribute to the project, causing her to fail the class. Yikes!

Let’s take a look.

AITA for not helping to defend my group project partner against our professor who wants to fail her for not contributing?

I (20M) am in a computer science course for college on operating systems. I was assigned this random group project partner (20F) and we were working on a project for most of the semester.

We had decided to organize the project in a way that she would do core parts and I would do plug-in modules that depend on her core.

Seems fair, but then she can’t complete her part in a way that works correctly.

However, since she did her parts in a convoluted way, it was hard for me to understand it and when I couldn’t get it to work she had to do them as well. We got into an argument and she claimed it wasn’t convoluted.

This guy went above and beyond by hiring a tutor and gets told they have to start over because of how she did the work.

I then paid a tutor who advised me and said he could help but that the project would be easier to do in rust compared to c++. She agreed to redo the project in rust if I converted everything we had so far myself and she’d help out with the last part. We got permission from the prof to do it in rust instead. The tutor then helped me convert her code to rust, which counted as my part.

However when it finally came to doing the last part she said she had no time to work with me on it as she didn’t know rust well enough and had some ballet competition the weekend of the deadline. She offered to finish it in the C++ version but I told her it is OK. I then got it done with the help of the tutor and submitted the project.

When it’s time to explain who did what work, it doesn’t look good for this young lady.

Since the rust code was all written by me in the statement of contribution I had to state that I did all the code and she contributed to the design process and report.

However the prof took that as her not contributing as only the code is actually graded and decided to give her a 0 on the project which would lead to her failing the class as it is 70% of the grade.

While it is unfortunate that she is likely going to fail the class, is that really his fault (she thinks so!)?

She now wants me to come talk to the professor with her and is upset at me for refusing. The way I see it it is not really my problem and I don’t want to face any trouble and she did already tell the prof that she had done the older c++ code we didn’t submit.

She’s pretty upset at me and seems to blame me when it is the profs decision.

AITA?

Yikes! On the one hand, while she did some work on the project, it wasn’t done correctly and then she bailed out.

On the other, having her fail the class is going to have a big impact on her future (and may even cost her money to retake it).

If I were in his shoes, I think I’d tell the professor that she did do some of the work and hope that she gets enough credit to pass. It doesn’t hurt me any and could help her a lot.

Let’s see if commenters agreed with my approach.

Exactly. If the shoes were on the other foot, OP would be upset I am sure!

I didn’t even think about this. Hiring a tutor to do the work is cheating!

If the project partner had known she was going to get thrown under the bus, I doubt she would have agreed to change the code to use Rust.

It seems this person did not realize that an important part of group projects is learning how to get along with others (an essential quality in the workplace).

Helping a fellow student pass a class is almost always the best course of action.

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