First person plural and third Person plural

Question

Here is a sentence one of my spanish friends wrote:

Creemos que esta distribución se debe a que los alumnos/as tendemos generalmente a "rivalizar” o “criminalizar” a los profesores, mientras que (...).

I noticed that she wrote "tendemos" instead of "tienden" and I wanted to ask her if it is an error but she told me that it is a way of including us as students, so grammatically, it is not wrong. I do not get the logic here. For me, this is an error of conjugation and it has to be "tienden". Writing "tendemos" makes no sense to me. Please can someone explain or elaborate. Thanks!

Answer 1

The conjunction of your friend is correct, the tenses imply the pronoun. What you propose is another different thing:

Creemos que esta distribución se debe a que los alumnos/as tendemos generalmente a...

• We believe this distribution is due to the fact that (we) the students generally tend to...

All the students including us: "nosotros tendemos".

Creemos que esta distribución se debe a que los alumnos/as tienden generalmente a...

• We believe this distribution is due to the fact (they) the students generally tend to...

All the students: "ellos tienden".

We can not say "ellos tendemos" o "nosotros tienden" because they do not correspond.