If only she knew about the revenge that was passively taken on her.
“When I was a freshman in uni, I had to take Chem as one of the prereqs for my major. For my lab, I was paired with other three students, which all happen to be part of the honors college and they knew I wasn’t. They would often talk about their honor class and how hard it was to be an honor student, and one of them whom I will refer to as K for “know it all” would kind of belittle me for not being part of such an elite group at a PUBLIC university.
Every week we had a lab that required a full written report, and the four of us divided the work into four sections. I always volunteered for the intro and conclusion since chemistry has never been my forte, but I was a fairly decent technical writer (not outstanding… but not bad, lol), so I stuck to what I knew how to do.
K kind of took the leadership role from our team and she would compile all of our parts and turn in the lab report. So we get the first report back, and we got points deducted from both my intro and conclusion… My spirits did fall low because I was sure I did a good job, plus I knew my teammates were smart, so I didn’t want to be THAT student – regardless everything was fine until a pattern began to develop. Week after week, points were being deducted from the intro and conclusion ONLY.
Then it all went down. After a few weeks, K gets one of our lab reports back and she stands in front of me with that sassy mad look (arms cross, foot tap and all), and she says something along the lines of, “You need to do better,” and I’m like, “I’m trying my best” (which I was! I was doing so much research and really trying to be accurate!), BUT THEN she goes like (word by word), “Well, obviously it’s not good enough.”
When she said this, I was so hurt and I just stayed quiet because that’s who I am… but what hurt the most was that she did it in front of our other teammates. I felt so humiliated. One of the other girls in our team was also taken aback by her comment and she tried defending me, which I truly appreciated but K just rolled her eyes and walked away.
Things didn’t improve after that. Points continued being deducted and it was all because of my sections.
Whatever.
It’s the end of the semester and I come across all the lab reports that I ended up keeping after the TA gave them back… For some reason, I decide to go over them and the intro and conclusion were NOTHING like the ones I wrote. Everything had been edited: format, word choice, and the entire freaking content was TOTALLY different. I. WAS. FURIOUS. I started writing a rant email to K, but in the middle of my dissertation, I thought of something better.
I emailed our TA.
I sent her everything. I explained everything that went down during the semester and sent her the original files and the emails I sent K that included the original attachments. I asked her to reconsider my grades and told her that I would accept any new grades she believed MY work deserved even if it meant having more points deducted (I was confident in my work, though). I also asked that if she considered better marks for my work to also grant the same grade to my other two teammates EXCEPT for K.
The TA got back to me after a couple of days, letting me know that my grades and those of my other two teammates had been updated (just in time for the university’s final grades deadline), and BAM! A+ as my final grade. Not sure what K got since I’m sure she did well in the final, but based the grade of all of our reports, it was a B.
I wanted to send K my new grades, but unfortunately, I’m not very brave. Plus, I’m sure her and the other two students would talk about it and find out since lab ended about two weeks before finals, and they still had that stupid honors class together.
But let me tell you, that the feeling of satisfaction I got was enough even if she never found out.”
