Do Top Students Avoid Helping Average Students Because They’re Scared of Lower Grades?
Last month, I waited by the locker bay after my 10th grader Liam’s midterm week, leaning against a cinder block wall eating a gas station granola bar, when I overheard his bio lab partner Javi ask a favor. Javi’s been hovering around a B- in the class all semester, and he asked if Liam could walk through Punnett squares and inheritance patterns after school, since he’d messed up that whole section on the midterm. Liam’s one of the top three students in the grade, so it made sense Javi would ask.
Liam slung his backpack over one shoulder and said he couldn’t, he had soccer practice right after school. I nodded, that checked out—practice was at 3:30. But when 4:45 rolled around and he walked out to the car, he dropped his bag, kicked a loose rock off the curb, and spent the next 20 minutes scrolling TikTok while we waited for his sister to finish dance practice. I didn’t say anything then, but over taco dinner that night, I brought it up.
At first he stuck to the soccer practice story. When I mentioned the scrolling, he sighed, pushed a crumpled napkin around his plate, and finally said what he really thought. “Mia’s the top kid in chem, right? She says if you start helping everyone all the time, you use up all your study time and your marks drop. Last term Jake helped Lila with chem every week for a month, and he went from an A to a B+. And anyway, bio’s curved. Only 10% of us get an A. If Javi moves up, that means someone else has to move down.”
That’s when I realized the question I’d heard other parents whisper about at soccer games was true for my kid too: top students aren’t just being mean when they turn down requests for help. A lot of them truly believe helping an average student will make their own grades worse.
I volunteer in the school’s library one morning a week, so I’ve watched this play out more than once. Top students huddle in the corner study rooms, sharing notes only with other top students. They turn down requests to share old study guides, or make up excuses when someone asks to walk through a tricky problem. It’s not universal—some kids don’t care, some love to help—but enough do it that it’s a pattern worth talking about.
The biggest thing I’ve learned is this isn’t a kid problem, it’s a system problem. It’s not that Liam doesn’t like Javi, or that he’s selfish. The school’s policy for all AP and honors classes is a fixed percentage curve: only 10% can get an A, 20% a B, and so on, no matter how everyone actually scores. That means it’s literally a zero sum game. If one average student studies enough and moves up to an A, a student who was already in the A range gets pushed down to a B. That’s not a fear kids made up—that’s the rule the school set. On top of that, every kid gets the message early on that class rank and straight A’s matter for getting into top colleges, so every point feels like it’s for your own future against everyone else’s.
When I realized that, I didn’t give Liam a lecture about being kind or sharing. Lectures don’t work when the kid has a real, rule-backed reason to worry. Instead, I just asked him to list all the reasons he thought helping would hurt him, so we could work through each one. The two big ones were not having enough study time for his own work, and losing his A to the curve.
For the time issue, we came up with a simple fix: he set a fixed 30-minute slot every Wednesday after school, before soccer practice, for anyone who needs help with bio. Now when someone asks, he doesn’t have to make up an excuse—he just tells them to come to Wednesday’s session. That way random requests don’t pop up every night before his own tests, and he controls how much time he spends.
For the grade fear, I mentioned I’d read once that teaching something to another person forces you to catch gaps in your own understanding you wouldn’t notice on your own. He didn’t believe me at first, but when he walked through Punnett squares with Javi at the first study session, he caught himself mixing up genotype and phenotype when he tried to explain the difference out loud. He fixed that mistake that night, before the unit retest, and told me later he probably would have missed that question on the test if he hadn’t been explaining it to Javi.
I brought this whole issue up at the last parent-teacher conference with the AP bio teacher, too. A lot of teachers use fixed curves because it’s easy to grade, but they don’t stop to think how it changes how kids interact. The simplest fix for teachers is to grade against a fixed standard instead of a curved percentage: 90% is an A, no matter how many kids hit that mark. If they have to curve because a test was way harder than intended, they can adjust scores upward without capping how many top grades can be given out. That one change removes the whole incentive for kids to hoard help.
It’s not a perfect fix for everything. The college admissions pressure still makes every kid feel like they’re competing against each other, and the school still uses fixed curves for most honors classes. Last week, Liam turned down a kid who asked for one-on-one help the night before his own AP calc midterm, and that’s a fair boundary he gets to set. He still spends most of his free time with other kids who have similar grades and extracurriculars. But right now, his Wednesday bio study session has four regular kids who come, including Javi. Javi got a B+ on his last midterm, and Liam got an A on the same test. It’s a small shift, not a solution to all the pressure kids feel, but it works for right now.
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