The students trying their best to look cute and not succeeding.

The students are trying their best to look cute, but they are not succeeding.

Lisette is right in her correction.

What you posted originally is not a sentence -- it's a fragment of a sentence because there is not a complete verb in the first part.

=)

To form a complete sentence, you need a subject and a predicate. The subject is the part of the sentence that performs the action or is being described, and the predicate is the part that provides information about the subject or tells what the subject is doing. In the original statement, "The students trying their best to look cute and not succeeding," there is no complete verb in the first part, making it a sentence fragment.

To correct the sentence, you can add a verb to the first part of the sentence, such as "are," to make it grammatically complete. Therefore, the corrected sentence would be: "The students are trying their best to look cute, but they are not succeeding."