Photo Courtesy of Hamilton College.
With finals week approaching and your grades dropping, it’s about time to resort to desperate measures to save your GPA. Maybe you really messed up on the midterm or wrote the worst essay ever. Do not worry! Here are some fool-proof ideas to get that 3.0 to 4.0.
5. Actually study and actually write your paper
Before you go any further in this article, this is definitely the best way to pass your classes. However, we’re looking for the easiest ways and this isn’t it. The path to success isn’t always clear, so we’re going to think outside the box. Who actually does their school work anyway? Lacrosse is far too taxing for me to have any energy left to devote to academics. Nobody has time to read the countless articles that are assigned. So, just don’t read them! Bear with me as we consider ways to succeed that you may not have thought of.
4. Ask your professor for the answer key to the final
The Honor Code at Hamilton is strict, and we all know it’s physically impossible to cheat here. If you even so much as steal a glance at the test next to you, an invisible force will crush you tighter and tighter until you asphyxiate. Some have compared the sensation to being strangled by an invisible boa constrictor. Don’t mess with the Honor Code. However, there’s nothing in the Honor Code preventing a professor from just giving you the answer key. I’m sure they’ll be happy to if you just ask. I mean, no one’s tried it before, have they?
3. Write your final paper on your professor’s book
Don’t introduce any of your own claims or interpretations. Just agree with everything they say like you’re writing a fifth-grade book report. Your professor will not be able to resist the praise of their own work. They’ll be flattered.
2. Suck up. Like really suck up.
Set up a tent outside your professor’s office. Greet them when they come into work in the morning and leave at night. Spend every second of office hours chatting with them about their family or anything but the class material, as you obviously are completely unfamiliar with it. If another student comes in, drive them out. Interrupt them, pretend they do not even exist — you have to assert your dominance. Your professor will take this as a sign of your devotion.
Have your mom call the school.
The Dean of Faculty is eager for parent feedback, and if your mom skips her pilates session to leave an angry voicemail about how her “little Brody is a smart kid who got straight A’s at St. Pompous’s School for the Pampered, and Professor Mungus is mean and doesn’t care that Brody’s on the lacrosse team and doesn’t have time to go to class,” the Dean will seriously consider the feedback and inform Professor Mungus immediately. Professor Mungus, thoroughly intimidated, will undoubtedly give you an A.
