So I am in college and we had this class project where we must build an app and actually release it on Play Store and App Store and Microsoft Store. Sir said he will rank all of us and honestly these days in India it is very tough for fresh graduates to get job, so being a topper looks very nice on the resume. I really wanted to come first.
When everyone published their apps I got bit worried because some of them looked proper good. So I asked my dads friend who has one online social consultation company to help me a little bit. Not anything major. Just few small reviews on the people who might get a high rank. Not even proper review bombing or anything. Since these are new apps hardly anyone even knows them.
There is one girl in my class who usually does very good on assignments even though in written tests she is kind of average. So for that reason I felt she is my biggest competition. I even wrote one comment like Actually she must be also cheating only when you see her work and maybe someone else is doing it. I used cursor and gave it the apk and told it to analyse and be critical. It gave one long comment saying somebody claiming to be a developer checked the app and found it poorly made and insecure. I passed it to my dads friend and they posted it in that style.
Finally results came and I was the class topper and honestly I felt so proud.
Few weeks later some students went digging and found out few reviews were fake and they complained. People suspected me because mine had only positive comments and praise. But I even made them write positive reviews for the worst performing students also so mine was not the only one.
That girl confronted me and got upset. She complained to sir but he said clearly that he grades everything by himself only and does not care about reviews at all. Grade is final. She came fourth so she is also counted among toppers only.
Honestly I feel I deserve first. I worked very hard and also one of the best tutors helped me polish the app. He is ex Facebook engineer and he guided me so many places so it became fully proper. Also sir literally said he did not look at any reviews so nothing was influenced. So I dont see the problem. Fourth is also very good she should be satisfied with that, especially when someone else is often doing her work only.
She is still mad at me because she also wanted to be first. So AITA?