Butler
New member
- Joined
- Feb 24, 2026
- Messages
- 9
I have a situation. A situation that is testing my patience, my GPA, and my will to live.
I'm in a partnered essay assignment. You know the kind. "Collaborative writing builds real-world skills." "Learn to work as a team." All that nonsense they put in the syllabus to justify making our lives harder. The essay is worth 40% of our grade, and I got paired with someone I'm going to call "Kevin."
Kevin is... a character. Kevin is the guy who shows up to class 20 minutes late with a Starbucks cup and zero apologies. Kevin is the guy who, in group discussions, says things that are confidently incorrect. Kevin, I have recently discovered, writes at approximately a 7th grade level.
We're supposed to write a 12-page analysis of post-colonial themes in Things Fall Apart. We divided the work. I took the first half of the book; he took the second half. We agreed to share our drafts a week before the deadline so we could merge them and make them cohesive.
Kevin sent me his draft yesterday. I opened the document with hope in my heart. I closed it three minutes later with my soul quietly leaving my body.
Kevin's writing is... how do I put this gently? It's a disaster. It's a beautiful disaster, like a car accident made of words. His sentences are either three lines long with no punctuation, or they're fragments that trail off into nothing. His thesis is "Things Fall Apart is about things falling apart." His evidence is quotes from the book with no analysis attached. He uses phrases like "in my opinion" every other sentence. He spelled the main character's name three different ways: Okonkwo, Okonkwo, and, my personal favorite, Okanakaw.
And now I have a choice. A terrible, no-good, very bad choice.
Option A: I rewrite Kevin's entire section myself. This means I'm effectively writing a 12-page essay on my own, doing double the work, and Kevin gets half the credit. I will be exhausted, resentful, and broke from buying all the caffeine required to make this happen.
Option B: I try to edit Kevin's section, preserving his ideas but fixing the language. This means I have to spend hours deciphering what he was trying to say, untangling his grammatical knots, and essentially performing literary surgery on a patient who's already flatlining.
Option C: I go to the professor, explain the situation, and hope she lets me submit separately or gives me some other accommodation. This feels like tattling. It also risks making Kevin hate me, and we have to present this project together at the end of the semester.
I'm leaning toward Option A, because I'm a control freak and I want a good grade. But my roommate, who has been watching this drama unfold with the detached fascination of someone watching a nature documentary, pointed out something important: "If you do all the work, Kevin learns nothing, and you learn that your time is less valuable than avoiding conflict."
She's right. I hate that she's right, but she's right.
So I'm here, asking the collective wisdom of the internet: how to write an essay when your partner is a liability, not an asset?
I need strategies. I need scripts for the difficult conversation I'm about to have with Kevin. I need to know if I should involve the professor now or try to fix it myself first. I need to know if I'm being unreasonable or if Kevin really is that bad.
For anyone who's survived a nightmare group project, what did you do? What worked? What backfired? How do you balance protecting your grade with not being a total jerk?
I'm in a partnered essay assignment. You know the kind. "Collaborative writing builds real-world skills." "Learn to work as a team." All that nonsense they put in the syllabus to justify making our lives harder. The essay is worth 40% of our grade, and I got paired with someone I'm going to call "Kevin."
Kevin is... a character. Kevin is the guy who shows up to class 20 minutes late with a Starbucks cup and zero apologies. Kevin is the guy who, in group discussions, says things that are confidently incorrect. Kevin, I have recently discovered, writes at approximately a 7th grade level.
We're supposed to write a 12-page analysis of post-colonial themes in Things Fall Apart. We divided the work. I took the first half of the book; he took the second half. We agreed to share our drafts a week before the deadline so we could merge them and make them cohesive.
Kevin sent me his draft yesterday. I opened the document with hope in my heart. I closed it three minutes later with my soul quietly leaving my body.
Kevin's writing is... how do I put this gently? It's a disaster. It's a beautiful disaster, like a car accident made of words. His sentences are either three lines long with no punctuation, or they're fragments that trail off into nothing. His thesis is "Things Fall Apart is about things falling apart." His evidence is quotes from the book with no analysis attached. He uses phrases like "in my opinion" every other sentence. He spelled the main character's name three different ways: Okonkwo, Okonkwo, and, my personal favorite, Okanakaw.
And now I have a choice. A terrible, no-good, very bad choice.
Option A: I rewrite Kevin's entire section myself. This means I'm effectively writing a 12-page essay on my own, doing double the work, and Kevin gets half the credit. I will be exhausted, resentful, and broke from buying all the caffeine required to make this happen.
Option B: I try to edit Kevin's section, preserving his ideas but fixing the language. This means I have to spend hours deciphering what he was trying to say, untangling his grammatical knots, and essentially performing literary surgery on a patient who's already flatlining.
Option C: I go to the professor, explain the situation, and hope she lets me submit separately or gives me some other accommodation. This feels like tattling. It also risks making Kevin hate me, and we have to present this project together at the end of the semester.
I'm leaning toward Option A, because I'm a control freak and I want a good grade. But my roommate, who has been watching this drama unfold with the detached fascination of someone watching a nature documentary, pointed out something important: "If you do all the work, Kevin learns nothing, and you learn that your time is less valuable than avoiding conflict."
She's right. I hate that she's right, but she's right.
So I'm here, asking the collective wisdom of the internet: how to write an essay when your partner is a liability, not an asset?
I need strategies. I need scripts for the difficult conversation I'm about to have with Kevin. I need to know if I should involve the professor now or try to fix it myself first. I need to know if I'm being unreasonable or if Kevin really is that bad.
For anyone who's survived a nightmare group project, what did you do? What worked? What backfired? How do you balance protecting your grade with not being a total jerk?