Is AUTHOR wrong in the post ? POST : As part of my graduate program, I am teamed up with three others that, for every non-elective class, we are required to work on every-group project together. The teams were assigned over the summer and last until graduation in May 2019. As part of the program, the school requires that a student has to finish with their team in order to graduate and receive a degree. Group projects are a significant part of those three class's grades (\~50%); the rest of the grade is exams (one did have a small homework component). Teams are allowed to fire a member of their group if there are issues.

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One of the members of my group, will call him X, stopped showing to team meetings a bit after midterms in the fall semester. We never really had a set official meeting time, but we did have certain time slots that worked most of the time, that the rest of us assumed would be open if/when we needed to meet given a few days notice--the "Meet up same time next week" or "lets do it after Thursday's class again" sort of deal. Up until the midterms, there were few issues with scheduling times, but everyone, including X during the first half of the semester, would promptly notify us, either in person or over group text, if they had a conflict and X regularly attended those project meetings. 

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Shortly after midterms and a week-long fall break after, X stopped showing up to the three classes we have together (only showed up 2-3 times in two of the classes, and only showed for the final for the third); the few times X did show up where when there was no group project in that particular class. None of us shared any electives with X so we do not know if X attended those other classes.

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One of the team members who knew X in undergrad, messaged X a few times to see what was up, and in one of those messages X casually mentioned that they were taking some serious drugs. X said that they would be better with attendance to meetings, but nothing changed. We also know that X did \*really\* bad on one of the midterms and we think that is a factor since it was right before the issues started.

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We talked with the program director about this mid Nov and she told us not to put X's name on the case study paper that was due shortly after, and to see what they do with the remaining project. She also said that she met with X in an email after, with the pretext that he was missing class, and asked if it was affecting the rest of the team. X denied that there was a problem and told her that there were no issues with the team or X's academic performance. 

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After X found out that we didn't put their name on the paper, we had a meeting with everyone and the program director. X got defensive thinking that everything was fine, that the problem was we didn't give X enough time to block out their schedule for the meetings. We countered saying that X didn't respond to any texts about setting up meeting times, that even a "sorry cant make it then" would have been okay and since they didn't go to class we couldn't get their input on meeting times face-to-face. We reached a sort of half-compromise of "finishing the semester strong" and the program director told us she will meet with us a few weeks after spring semester starts to see where we are. 

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X did some work on the final project on their own and sent us the file to work off of (most of the math stuff was done), but a) we had issues following along with out them there, b) I felt wrong accepting their work after this mess with out contributing and c) we wanted to use the project as practice for the final exam, so we redid the work. We finished the rest after a meeting &amp; finished the final part of the write up on a google doc over the last week at everyone's own time, which X didn't contribute to. 

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After the rest of us finished studying for our last final (X didn't attend any of our study session either), we all said that we had enough and wanted to fire X. I said that I would take care of it over the holiday break, since the other two members planned on leaving campus the next night so I haven't talked to them again until today.

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Toady, I wrote up an email draft to the director saying that we wanted to fire X, what is the procedure, and sent it to the other two to review before sending. They are starting to have cold feet and are no longer 100% onboard, and now I'm trying to convince them over group message to fire X. Classes resume next week and I want to get this done before then (didn't want to ruin anyone's Xmas but now I think that was a mistake for waiting this long).

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I don't want to condone/enable/overlook someone who is using hard drugs. I don't want to give credit to this teammate when they don't do any work anymore. I don't want to carry the burden for someone who doesn't attend class. We gave X extra chances, and I don't want to give X another. If X gets fired they have to find a new team to take them in, which could be difficult; other teams will know something is up if X got fired and they may not want to pick up damaged goods. There is a good chance that this fucks X's degree up since they won't graduate and X's previous year will be a waste of time &amp; money. I don't know if this will make X's drug issues worse and spiral out of control. However, maybe this is a trigger to get their life back on track. I'm also feeling like an asshole trying to convince the other team members, who I like and respect very much cause they also don't want to ruin X's life. But I'm on the edge of pulling the "its me or X card" mostly cause I'm having ethical issues enabling substance use and looking for another team because I don't want to 'work' with X anymore.

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\*\*TLDR: A team member stopped contributing to group projects, no longer attended lectures and drugs are a factor; I'm trying to convince the rest of my team to fire them and potentially screw their degree and life up for a few years.\*\*