Do Top Students Avoid Helping Average Classmates Out of Fear of Lower Grades?
I was leaning against my car by the middle school bike rack last October, waiting for my 8th grader Jax, when I saw him trudge over from the soccer field, scuffing his sneakers on the cracked asphalt and kicking a crumpled lemonade can ahead of him. I asked if his practice had gone badly, and he shook his head, then mumbled that he’d asked Lila— the top math student in our district, who gets straight A’s and already has a spot at the competitive magnet high school next year— to explain the quadratics homework after school, and she’d turned him down.
We stopped for tacos on the way home, and over a plate of carnitas, he admitted what his friend Mia had told him after: Lila doesn’t help most people with math anymore. The class uses a curved grading scale for final ranks, and Lila said if too many people pull their scores up, her rank will drop, which will hurt her chances for college scholarships.
I’ll admit I was surprised. I’d always assumed top students were happy to help— that tutoring looks good on college applications, that teaching someone else reinforces your own knowledge, all that stuff I’d read in education thinkpieces. But when I brought it up to Jax’s math teacher Ms. Henderson at parent-teacher conferences two weeks later, she nodded like she heard this every month. She said it’s way more common than most parents realize.
Last semester, she told me, the three top students in biology agreed to host a study group before the midterm for kids who were struggling. None of them showed up. When she pulled each aside separately, no yelling, just to ask why, all three said the same thing: they were scared other kids would outscore them on the curved exam, and they’d lose their spot on the state science honor society trip. One of them said his dad cuts his gaming time by an hour every week if his rank drops out of the top three in his grade. It’s not that the kids are mean, Ms. Henderson said. They’re just kids responding to the pressure we put on them.
That stuck with me. I talked about it a few days later with my neighbor Sarah, whose daughter is the top student in her 11th grade class. She told me she’d gone through the exact same thing the year before. Her daughter had helped a friend study for the AP Chem midterm, and the friend ended up scoring one point higher than her. Her daughter came home crying, saying “I told you this would happen, I never should have helped her.”
Sarah didn’t tell her to stop being selfish or to be a better person. She just pulled out the two girls’ practice test scores from before the study session. Her daughter had gotten a 82% on the practice, and a 94% on the actual. The friend had gotten a 68% on the practice, and a 95% on the actual. “See?” Sarah said. “Explaining all that stuff to her made you raise your score 12 points. You wouldn’t have gotten that 94 if you’d just studied alone, would you?” Her daughter didn’t say anything at the time, but a week later she started helping two other kids with chem after school. That’s a small, concrete shift that works way better than any lecture about being kind.
If you’re a parent of a top student, that’s the first thing you can do: swap out the questions you ask every day. Instead of opening with “what rank did you get on the test?” or “how did everyone else do compared to you?” ask “did anyone ask you for help with school work this week?” or “what’s one thing you learned this week that you could explain to me?” That shifts the focus from beating other people to actually understanding material, which is what actually helps grades long term. If your kid mentions being scared to help someone, pull out their past test scores like Sarah did, and point out how explaining stuff actually helped them. It’s a concrete example that sticks way better than a generic “it’s good to help people” speech.
If you’re the parent of an average kid who’s been turned down for help, there’s a small shift that works too. Tell them to ask for small, specific favors instead of big open-ended ones. Instead of “can you teach me all of factoring this week?” have them say “can you just walk me through the third problem on the homework? I can’t get the first step.” Big requests feel like a huge time drain to a kid who already has three hours of homework and a soccer practice. A 2-minute question is way less intimidating, and most top kids will say yes, even if they’re a little wary of hurting their own rank.
For teachers, Ms. Henderson told me she’s started building 10 minutes of mixed-ability peer help into every class, and gives participation points for explaining problems to classmates. That way, helping other people doesn’t hurt your grade—it helps it. She also talked to the school board last year about uncurving honors classes, since curved grading inherently pits kids against each other. They didn’t change the policy for the whole district yet, but her department got approval to stop curving 8th grade honors math this year.
Jax started going to Ms. Henderson’s after-school mixed-ability math study group a few days after our taco talk. Lila joined a month later, because Ms. Henderson said leading the group counts towards her National Honor Society community service hours. Last month, Jax got a B on his algebra midterm—his first B all year. He said Lila explained factoring to him in a way that made way more sense than any in-class lecture. Lila got an A, one point higher than she got on the previous test, and told Jax she had to rework the steps three times to explain it to different people, so it stuck way better for her.
It’s not perfect, though. Lila still gets quiet when class rank gets posted every quarter, and she still turns down one-on-one help requests outside of the school-run study group sometimes. Jax still struggles with word problems, and he still has to work twice as hard as Lila to get a B. But the idea that top students are just selfish for avoiding helping other people doesn’t hold up, not when you see where the fear comes from. It’s not the kids—it’s the pressure we pile on them, one rank and one scholarship and one car permission at a time. Small shifts don’t fix the whole system overnight, but they help one kid get a concept he couldn’t grasp, and one top student realize helping doesn’t hurt her grade. That’s enough for now.
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