Campus Free Labor Turned Head Judge

When I see someone asking for help in an assignment related to the entrepreneur course on the college forum, I join the group chat using a student account. I even help refine several financial models and market strategies because of my job's nature.

Everyone in the group chat is excited, to say the least. Every day, they keep calling me a genius while urging me to improve the details of the whole assignment.

Two months later, the assignment's quality is very close to perfection. But the group chat suddenly goes silent.

I scroll through the chat history out of curiosity, only to find out that the students have already created another group chat.

"That senior isn't an official teammate of ours. Let's not tell her about us using this assignment for an upcoming competition."

"Precisely! Our names are the only ones on the list! She'd better not steal the credit during tomorrow's finals!"

"With one less person involved, we each get an additional tens of thousands of dollars' worth of rewards!"

As I look at the screen, I just let out a soft chuckle.

It appears that this isn't an assignment at all.

But unfortunately for these students, I happen to be one of the judges sitting at the judging station tomorrow.

The students I'd been guiding had created a new forum group chat, but they had forgotten that one of the accounts they were using was a shared account with me.

The moment I logged in, messages in the new group started popping up nonstop.

"We were just being nice to her. She doesn't know anything."

"Exactly. All she did was flap her mouth and tweak a few lines of data. We were the ones pulling all-nighters, writing reports, making the slides, and running errands. Why the hell should she get any money?"

"I know, right? We'll insist this was just a final project. No one's allowed to talk in that group. We won't say anything in it for a few days. Then, we'll shut it."

A final project?

That was exactly how I had been tricked into joining in the first place. So they still planned to lie all the way through.

I felt a surge of irritation.

I opened the old group chat and sent a message from my own account, "I've been guiding you guys for a long time. So, I need to remind you that some of the sources and depth of the core financial models and market forecast data in these reports are much closer to an actual business plan.

"Because of that, they can only be used for regular coursework. They absolutely cannot be used in a business competition, or the judges will question where the data came from."

In the two months since I'd joined the group, I had rarely spoken in such a professional and serious tone.

If they stopped whatever they were doing now and collected publicly available data, I could pretend I didn't know anything. I wouldn't make things difficult for them at tomorrow's finals.

A barrage of messages flooded into the new group chat almost immediately.

The youngest member, Taylor Lark, sent a shocked emoji and wrote, "If she's saying that, does that mean she knows we're planning to use it for the competition?"

The team leader, Sylvester Wallace, was dismissive of this notion. He texted, "What are you panicking for? She says she's reminding us. Who does she think she is, putting on that high-and-mighty act? She's just afraid she won't get a single cent, so now she's freaking out and trying to scare us."

Another male teammate, Zander Stewart, chimed in right away, "Sylvester's right. She just doesn't want to see us win using her stuff. She wants to look all impressive and indispensable."

I rested my chin in my hand and laughed helplessly in my office. So they knew all along that this was my work.

When I first joined the group, everything they had was a complete mess. I kept teaching them theories and practical applications, but what they turned in was always riddled with mistakes. In the end, I had no choice but to revise it myself.

By the time it was finished, every single part had been typed out by me. I had done it bit by bit at the cost of my sleep.

As for what they bragged about pulling all-nighters, revising drafts, making slides, and running errands…

At best, that only entailed downloading things from Google and slapping together a slideshow template before tossing it into the group chat to brush me off while claiming they had personally conducted market research.

And now, they had relied on my work to make it into the finals. Yet, they wanted to cut me out completely.

Ten minutes later, Sylvester finally sent a message in the old group chat.

He wrote, "Fine. Since you've made it clear, I won't beat around the bush either. All that guidance you gave was just theory that anyone can find online. We understood it long ago. As if we needed you to tell us."