Competitive child

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Now, I am working as a teacher's assistant in a SpE classroom. There is this one child who has to always finish before his friend/classmate in any academic task or he becomes completely undone. Neither his teacher nor I know why this is so. His classmate is not competitive at all, makes many mistakes and is downright terrified of evaluation. Does anyone have any thoughts on this? Once, I gave him a math sheet to do and I said, "Let's see if you can work through these problems?" His reply was, "What is THAT supposed to mean?" This is what I say to all the kids when I hand out worksheets. I explained this to him and he was alright with it.

Aspergers can produce a focus of attention that can exclude many other considerations. This can be more observable in children as they have not yet learned to modify or control the intensity of their focus.

This usually diminishes with age. However, it can be helped along by asking questions like, "What do you think will happen if you take longer to complete this task?" "Will. you be embarrassed, beaten, cheated out of money?"

Aspergers often hinders the development of perspective because an intensity of focus can exclude a more balanced consideration of other factors. This can be seen with playing of games where the desire to win results in poor social behavior.

Perhaps one strategy to consider is shifting focus such that one task is put on the back burner to complete another one. The first task can then be resumed. This is a crude approximation of learning to shift focus and thereby allow consideration of other factors to broaden ones focus.

The only downside is that shifting tasks causes anxiety because the task is not finished and stays on ones mind even when the new task is being worked on. It is why I personally seem to be vunerable to shutdowns in work situations.
At home where things are more relaxed I find I have lots of unfinished tasks which are fine with me because it is only me who wants to do them. I am not working for others so there is no pressure so I am not risking shutdowns so much.
Having sudden shifts between tasks is a shutdown trigger and in the work enviroment this can happen often. Shifting between tasks to get back to a task or tasks later means ones mind has to keep several lines of thought at the same time as concentrating on the task one is working on in the now, because I can find it difficult to switch off the other tasks without loosing all the information for the previous tasks if I do and ending up in trouble when bicycles go out with parts that have not been paid for... (I would write things down but I have been told off for doing that in the past as it takes extra time).
I give working on bicycles as an example.
It is not that I can't switch between tasks but it is by doing it will likely end up in lost time because either I will be in a partial shutdown where all my functions will be on a "Go slow" or I will end up trying to force myself to keep up the pace and end up fully shutting down on the floor which takes a long time to recover from before I am back up to my normal pace. (Takes a while before I can get up from the floor sometimes!)

So is shifting between tasks for an autistic kid a good thing to do? It depends on the kid I guess. Try it and see what happens?

I would imagine that the kid has a compulsive rush to finish because in the past he may have been told off for being too slow and gained an inbuilt fear that he had to finish before others or be would be told off again.
It is a bit like I used to have to hide behind a hedge whenever a car passed on the road. A fear of being seen in public while walking... Which probably stemmed from the need to be in a safe position while aalking on these roads as they are little country roads so one has to at times quickly jump out the way as cars vision going round the bends is limited.