BY GABY NIEVES
Co-Managing Mosaic Editor
My fellow students, doomsday is upon us — final exams have arrived. Your professor is accepting late work until May 16, but the thing is, you’re missing half of the assignments for the entire course. You’ve run your “What-If” scores through Canvas and, to your horror, have learned that you’ll need to obtain a 128% on the final to pass the class with the grade you want. The future of your transcript is looking grim.
However, I entreat you to hold off on accepting what looks to be your imminent failure — there’s still hope. It’s not too late to save your grade. Fasten your seatbelt, because you’re about to make the greatest academic comeback of all time. You will make your final grade look like the picture of consistency and hard work, successfully catfishing everyone that doesn’t know you actually procrastinated on studying your lecture notes the entire semester.
You are going to do what was once thought to be impossible. You are going to lock in. You are going to transform into the ultimate academic weapon.
Here’s how:
- You will call your loved ones and say goodbye. Temporarily, of course. God, did you think I meant you would be saying goodbye forever? Of course not! But you will have to say it for now, because you’ll be completely disabling all of your phone notifications for the next week. You won’t need to be worried about who’s contacting you because you won’t be contacting a soul. Sorry Mom, talk to you after finals.
- You will find a corner of Morris Library to call your new home. However, you will need to stay planted in said corner between now and right before the exam that you didn’t study for, so make sure there are no trash cans near it. You don’t want the custodians to see you during their final trash run of the night — how else are you supposed to stay in the building past closing time?
- You will binge watch every lecture you missed in one sitting. Get to it, maggot! You expect me to believe you can watch the first three seasons of “Succession” in one week, but can’t watch three weeks worth of unviewed Course Capture content in that same amount of time!? Likely story! Come on, hop to it! Let’s go, go, go!
- You will create the most extensive cheat sheet ever known. If one of your professors does, in fact, allow you to bring a notecard, A4 size piece of printer paper or some other form of a cheat sheet, they will do so with no clue that you’ve written everything they ever spoke in that class onto that formerly-blank sheet. Will the writing be minuscule and borderline illegible? Maybe. But will there be zero white space left on the paper, meaning there will be zero information you won’t have access to? Absolutely.
- You will save your grade. By following these steps, you will ensure your success — and become an academic force to be reckoned with. Despite not doing any homework since February, you will be able to hand every assignment to your TA after the hours you spend in the library, ignoring your parents’ phone calls. Your eyes and brain might hurt quite a bit after transcribing countless lecture slides onto a notecard in teeny tiny letters, but you will ace your exam. Because you put yourself in academic weapon mode, you pulled off the greatest comeback this campus has ever seen.
Your transcript won’t show it, but you and everyone you tell will know of your impressive feat. And remember — if there’s one thing more terrifying than people who can manage their time wisely and get a good grade, it’s people who can procrastinate up until the very last minute and still finish the class with an A.
