Do Top Students Avoid Helping Average Students Out of Fear of Lower Grades? A Teacher’s Perspective
The coffee in my mug had gone cold and I was picking at a stale granola bar when Mia knocked on my classroom door after school last month, shoulders hunched like she was in trouble. She’s my top 8th grade math student, straight A’s, already taking 9th grade algebra on the side, so when she said she needed to talk, I expected she was upset about a tricky homework problem. I was wrong. “Jake asked me to help him study for the slope test next week,” she said, leaning against the desk. “I told him I had to study for chemistry, but I don’t have a chemistry test tomorrow. I just don’t want to help him.” I asked her why, and she said what so many kids have said to me over 12 years of teaching middle school: “If I teach him how to do this, he’ll get a better grade. The curve will shift, my rank will drop, and I won’t get into the STEM magnet. That’s what my mom says, every point counts.”
I started a peer study buddy program this year, because I’ve seen how much better kids absorb explanations from someone their own age, instead of listening to me repeat the same thing for the 10th time. Jake is a solid B- student, works hard after school helping his dad with landscaping, so he doesn’t have as much time to study as some other kids. He just struggles to wrap his head around the conceptual stuff that clicks easily for Mia. This wasn’t a case of Mia being mean or Jake being lazy—it was the quiet fear that’s become way more common in middle and high school than adults like to admit: that helping someone else will cost you your own spot at the table.
I’ve had parents pull me aside at parent-teacher conferences straight out and ask me not to assign their top child tutoring work. One mom told me last year, “He worked so hard to get that rank, why should he give that advantage to someone else?” That’s where this fear starts, not with kids being greedy—it’s with adults planting the idea that grades are a zero-sum game. There are only so many A’s, only so many spots in honors programs, only so many acceptances to good colleges. If someone else gains, you lose.
Is that actually true? Do top students really risk lower marks when they help average scoring peers? I’ve kept casual notes on this for years, because it comes up so often. Out of the 42 top students I’ve had tutor peers regularly over the last decade, 37 scored higher on their own cumulative exams than they did on previous tests, and the other 5 stayed the same. None scored lower. There’s a simple reason for that: when you have to explain a concept to someone who doesn’t get it, you can’t just memorize the steps. You have to unpack why the steps work, and that exposes the tiny gaps in your own knowledge you never noticed when you were just doing the problems for yourself. When Mia was studying for her own test, she didn’t need to explain why m equals rise over run—she just used the formula. If she has to explain it to Jake, she has to dig into the part she half-memorized, and that makes it stick for her, too.
That doesn’t mean we can just tell kids to get over their fear and help everyone who asks. There are real tradeoffs, and we have to respect that. A kid who spends two hours after school every week tutoring is giving up time they could use for their own homework, extracurriculars, or just resting after a long week. That’s why small, structured changes work way better than asking kids to sacrifice their own time for free.
For teachers, that means building peer help into the school day, not asking it to be an after-school activity. I do 20 minute peer review blocks twice a week during homeroom, so no one loses their personal time. It’s a small shift, but it takes the pressure off both the helper and the student needing help. For parents, if you have a top student, stop saying things like “don’t let anyone copy your hard work” or “every point matters for rank.” Instead, next time they mention helping a classmate, ask “What did you have to explain that you didn’t think about before?” That shifts the focus from what they might lose to what they’re gaining for themselves. If you have an average student who needs help, don’t just have them cold ask a top classmate for a favor. Ask the teacher to arrange a reciprocal swap. Jake, for example, runs the morning announcements and is great with tech. He helped Mia fix her student council campaign slides when she couldn’t get the animations to work, so helping Jake with study time isn’t a one-way give. It’s a fair trade.
Mia agreed to try the 20 minute twice a week block with Jake. Two weeks later, after the slope test, she came up to me after class and said she’d caught her own mistake while explaining. She’d been mixing up where the constant goes when you rearrange an equation, a mistake she would have made on the test if she hadn’t had to walk through it step by step for Jake. She got a 100% on the test. Jake got a B+, his highest score on a math test all year.
It worked out for both of them, but I don’t pretend this solves the whole problem. Last week, I heard another top student turn down a request for help with algebra, because her dad told her not to waste time on people who aren’t putting in the same work she is. The pressure for rank and spots at good programs isn’t going anywhere, and it’s going to keep making kids think that helping someone else means hurting themselves. We can’t fix the whole system overnight, but we can stop feeding the zero-sum myth one conversation at a time. Most of the time, when kids help each other, no one loses. It just takes a little structure to make that true for everyone.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » Do Top Students Avoid Helping Average Students Out of Fear of Lower Grades