Previous research has shown that many students experience significant challenges as they transition from secondary to higher education and that these challenges often are related to students’ ability to take responsibility for their studies, here called self-responsibility. However, there is no consensus in research or practice regarding how students develop self-responsibility and how teachers can support this development. This presentation contributes to addressing this gap by exploring how students’ self-responsibility is discursively constructed and negotiated in student-teacher interaction in a first-year engineering program in Sweden. An extensive ethnographic data material is analyzed through the lens of positioning theory, with a particular focus on how students’ rights and duties related to their self-responsibility are negotiated. The results show that teachers often confront students with an ideological dilemma: students are positioned as having the duty to take self-responsibility but also as not always having the right to do so. For example, teachers often urge students to take responsibility for planning their studies, but teachers also withhold information that would allow students to make informed decisions about, e.g., whether or not to attend non-mandatory lectures. The results also show that students sometimes resist teachers’ attempts at positioning them as not responsible. These resistances, in turn, provide a starting-point for identifying ways in which teachers could better contribute to positioning students as self-responsible and thus to leverage students’ own efforts of becoming self-responsible.