College student is forced to do a group project in which nobody does anything so she decides to get revenge: 'I let the excruciatingly silent seconds drag on every single time, looking slowly to both of them with each question and taking my sweet time'

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Olivia Arocena • Writer and Editor
Jul 9, 2026 4:00 PM EDT

The much-feared group projects

Back when I was in college, I had to work in groups all the time, and many of these things happened to me. And I suppose they happened to anyone who went through any sort of formal education. I genuinely don't know why teachers put people through stuff like this. I've thought about it many times; it might be because they want you to learn that in life, things don't always go as planned and you have to, very often, work side by side with people who don't care about anything or who purposely ruin everything. Obviously, it's not because they think group projects work better than solo ones; too many years have gone by that prove that theory wrong. This Redditor shared a story about how she got back to her groupmates that is a very good example of how to do it the elegant way; I even wish I could go back and do this instead of getting into petty, never-ending arguments about who's working and who's not.

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  • a woman standing in front of a projection screen
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    The student doing her presentation alone

    Subject is a model

  • How I Handled Being the Only Person in a Group Project Who Gave a Single...

    Long ago, I was a university student majoring in literature -- naturally, I had a schedule. packed with lit classes, and this group project took place during a course entitled Madness in Classic Literature. It was
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  • fun; the professor was zany, and the topics were rather interesting. Then, one day, the dreaded group project assignment arrived, where we were to split up into groups of three and do a
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  • 30-minute presentation on madness in any era of literature. I ended up with two studious-seeming partners, one of whom was emphatically invested in doing our project on madness in 1800s
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  • Scotland. She was persuasive, we were convinced, but when we told the professor, he kind of...winced? Then he held us after class, asked us if we were sure, she certainly
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  • was, and he kind of absently nodded and said. he'd help us find a couple of sources since literature in 1800s Scotland is apparently more scarce than one would think.
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  • We ended up with permission to cover Lord Byron by association, along with an incredibly long and dry text about some guy who is either hallucinating or having an
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  • existential reli_ous experience with the devil himself. Now, I've read some boring texts in my day, but this piece was far and away the most mind- numbing collection of words my brain has ever scraped itself against.
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  • To make matters worse, it soon became very, very apparent that neither of my partners, including the girl who was gagging over 1800s Scotland to start with, had a single intention of doing any of the work
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  • for this project. They didn't even read the material, not even the relatively short Lord Byron poem. Woe. So, I just dove in and did the entire project myself, including the required handouts that we were
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  • supposed to print out for the class to follow along with our presentation. That's when I decided to get petty. I didn't want to be that student who rats on fellow students, but I also didn't want my
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  • partners (especially the girl whose love of Scotland forced me into this mess) to get off entirely scot- free. So, I memorized everything. I mean everything. And for the worksheet, I basically wrote down bullet points
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  • that revealed nothing about the texts or their contents. The day of the presentation arrives, and I meet my partners in class and give them the worksheets. They're
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  • relieved that I seem to know what I'm doing and suspect absolutely nothing. Our time comes, and we stand up in front of the class, with them on either side of me, and I pass out the worksheets and proceed to talk about
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  • madness in 1800s Scotland from memory, going into exhaustive detail on Lord Byron and whatever the f protagonist (I think his name was Tim) from the other text. My partners were silently, gravely
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  • The worst part is how the girl who first abandoned the ship was so eager to embark on it at first. What’s worst about these kinds of groups, or at least it’s what was worst to me, is that no matter how much you work, and no matter how little the others work, everyone gets the same grade in the end; that’s why I consider her technique a very good way of pinpointing who actually knows something about the subject and who doesn’t.

  • nodding along for the entire 30 minutes. I finished speaking, and then came the Q&A portion of the presentation -- fellow classmates were
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  • Cheezburger Image 10645708800
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  • paused a long, pregent pause, and gave my partners a chance to answer instead, if they so wished. I let the excruciatingly silent seconds drag on every single time, looking slowly to both of them with each
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  • question and taking my sweet time before jumping in. Within a couple of minutes, it became incredibly evident to everyone there that I was the only person in our group project who knew a
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  • single god d ed thing about madness in 19th- century Scottish literature. So sure -- I did the whole project, and let them think it was fine up until it wasn't. Petty? Absolutely. But by god, if I had to read
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  • student raises his hand
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    The Q&A about to start

    Image is representative

  • that awful story because someone else watched Outlander too many times, then I'm going to comply maliciously.
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  • Edit: I'm happy to report that the professor pulled me aside after the fact and said that, given our performances, he would be grading me and my partners separately. I got an A, and strangely, they stopped talking to me after
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  • that group project, so I have no idea what grades they received. Bad enough to cut contact, though. Bless.
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  • woman in glasses at a desk smiling with a chalkboard full of equations behind
    via Vitaly Gariev

    The student after she successfully handled the group project situation

    Image is a representation

  • The petty route would’ve been telling the professor that nobody did anything but her; this was just pure, unadulterated truth. I even think the rest of the group stopped talking to her because they are ashamed; they might be a little mad as well, but deep down they are ashamed because they know they didn’t do anything. So either way, good for her! Let’s all take notes.



     

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