Why Do Top Students Sometimes Refuse to Help Average Classmates? What Parents Should Know
Last October, I pulled up to the high school to pick up my daughter Lila, who’s consistently top 3 in her 10th grade class. It was pouring, the heater was blowing lukewarm air, and there were crumbs of cheddar goldfish stuck in the cup holder from her after-school snack. Her friend Mia, who gets mostly Bs and struggles with math, leaned into the passenger window before heading to her own bus. She asked Lila to help her prep for the midterm, offered to buy that iced matcha latte Lila gets from the coffee shop down the street. Lila smiled and said she was too busy cramming for her own test, couldn’t fit it in. Mia nodded and left, and I pulled out into traffic.
I turned to Lila and said I knew she’d spent 45 minutes scrolling TikTok the night before, and she had an hour free every evening that week before her robotics practice. Why’d you say no? She was quiet for a minute, picking at a loose thread on her hoodie, then said: All the girls in my honors class say if I help people get better scores, they’ll take my spot. Mrs. Lee grades on a curve this semester. If enough people move up, I drop down, and that hurts my class rank for college apps.
I was shocked at first. I’d always raised her to share what she knows, help people out. I thought she’d turned into some selfish kid, but then I thought back to a conversation I’d overheard a few weeks earlier at a classmate’s birthday party. A dad was saying to his son, who’s top of our district, “Why would you host that study session? All those kids are gunning for the same Ivies you are. You’re just helping them beat you.” It stuck with me then, but I didn’t think it would trickle down to a 10th grade math midterm.
A week later, I ran into Lila’s math teacher Mrs. Lee at the grocery store, and we both waited in line for self-checkout with jugs of skim milk in our baskets. I brought up the conversation with Lila, asked her if this was something she sees often. She said yeah, way more than most people think. It’s not just the kids picking this up out of nowhere. Parents often reinforce it, and the way we structure grades and rankings doesn’t help. She told me last year, a valedictorian candidate stopped doing open study sessions after two kids he’d tutored scored higher than him on the AP calculus final. His mom called the school to ask if we could adjust his rank because he’d “wasted time helping others.”
It’s easy to write this off as top kids being greedy or parents being too pushy, but it’s actually a really logical fear when you break down the system kids are in. If your kid has spent years building up their class rank for college, and one or two spots can make the difference between getting into their target school or not, why would they risk that? It’s not that they don’t want to help, it’s that they’ve been told over and over that their value is in their rank, not in how well they help other people.
What I did with Lila that day wasn’t lecture her about being kind. I just pulled up the grading policy Mrs. Lee had posted on the class website, and we walked through it together. The curve for that midterm applied to 120 kids. For Mia to move up 15 points to a B+, how much would that shift Lila’s percentile? We did the rough math together: it would move Lila’s score less than half a percentile. Her rank would stay exactly the same. That’s a small, concrete step any parent can take if your kid is worried about this – pull back the curtain on the grading, do the math together, instead of just telling them their fear is silly.
After that, Lila agreed to help Mia for 45 minutes every other night that week. I made a point to comment on the work she put in, not just the good deed. When I heard her explaining how to rearrange formulas to Mia over the phone, I said later, “That was such a smart way to break that down. I never would have thought to explain it that simply.” Celebrating the skill of teaching, not just the act of being nice, reinforces that helping others is something that adds to your kid’s experience, not takes away from it. As it turned out, Lila told me after that explaining the formulas to Mia made her catch a mistake she was making in word problems – she’d been skipping a step she didn’t even realize she didn’t understand, and having to explain it forced her to fix it. She ended up with a higher score than she would have if she’d just crammed alone.
For teachers, Mrs. Lee told me she made one small change a few years back that cut down on this tension a lot: instead of posting a ranked list of scores by the door after every test, she only gives kids their own score and percentile individually. No one knows exactly where everyone else stands, so the pressure to stay above everyone else is lower. She also gives 5 extra credit points to any study group where every member improves by at least 5 points from the last test, so helping the whole group actually helps you, instead of hurting you. It’s a tiny adjustment that shifts the whole dynamic.
If you’re the parent of an average kid who got turned down for help, don’t badmouth the other kid to your child. It’s easy to say “that kid’s just selfish and scared you’ll outperform them,” but that just makes your kid feel like the system is stacked against them and adds unnecessary stress. Instead, say “That student is really busy focusing on their own preparation right now, let’s try another option.” Then name specific options: 20 minutes after class with the teacher tomorrow, that free 10-part video series on quadratics your teacher linked on Google Classroom, ask Jake from your biology study group if he wants to swap help – you help him with lab reports, he helps you with math.
A few weeks ago, Lila got asked to help a boy in her AP bio class prep for the unit test, and she said no. I asked her if it was the rank worry again, or if she really was busy. She said she’s swamped finishing her college portfolio this month, and it’s a little of both. She told him she’d help him after she turns it in, though. The fear doesn’t just go away overnight. As long as colleges care more about rank than how well kids collaborate, this will keep popping up. But it doesn’t have to be a given. Small, concrete changes, talking through the fears instead of dismissing them, can make a big difference for kids on both sides.
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