All students in Swedish upper secondary school have to do one mandatory project work course aimed at developing general skills such as independence, initiative, creativity and imagination. The students have to pass the course to receive their upper secondary diploma. Our study aims to investigate how students talk about the task of doing ‘independent’ project works in the diploma course.

Three focus group conversations of totaling twelve students are filmed and analyzed through topic analysis, an analytical approach based on dialogism as theoretical framework. The empirical material is analyzed from a perspective of how the design of the project course and the assessment regime influences the students work. Findings indicate that the students rely heavily on help and instruction from the teacher. They perceive of this help as a crucial asset in passing the diploma course. They state that the kind of help they receive are strongly focused towards the dividing line between pass and fail. Help is hardwired towards the scientific form and the content of their essays are treated as almost uninteresting. Support for independence therefore seems to be significantly restricted in practice. The teacher is in fact working as a facilitator guiding students towards dependence. This is accomplished through framing doing project work as doing template science.