The 2015 Autumn Semester is drawing to a close and spring 2016 is right around the corner. Many of you are still struggling with reaching your highest potential in school, and you might be still stuck with the same mentality as a senior in high school. The most important thing to remember is that college is different. It requires a certain finesse and strategy to maximize what you get out of each class. Top researchers at The Sundial got together and made a comprehensive list to improve other student’s grades and create a more enjoyable college experience. This list was created based on the top performers here and is tailored to help you improve your grades. So get out your notebook and favorite pen, here are some sick tips to perform well in college:

 

  1. Show up Late to Class. Hear us out. Showing up late will distract your fellow students. If you do it frequently, it will distract your peers enough to lower their grades and by comparison, bring up yours. Showing up late requires a certain ‘je ne sais quoi’ that can take a while to perfect.

    • Mastering the timing for being perpetually late can be difficult, as different lecturers start at different times. The research shows at least fifteen minutes late is the general rule of thumb. The professor will eventually notice that you’ve been showing up late, causing them to pull you aside. Because of this, you’ll get special attention, which is crucial to being successful in college.

    • Show up to class wearing absurdly overpriced headphones around your neck. For the purposes of this tutorial they serve as a crappy speaker system, the worse the quality the better. Blare the most annoying music you can think of. Noise art bands are usually the best, but if you’ve made a mixtape you should definitely use that. Blaring music does two things for you:

    1. It lets other people know that you are trying to become an aspiring rap artist and that school is just a fall back.
    2. It promotes your music career. Let’s face it, you want a captive audience and college classrooms are easy to find. Besides, no one will leave because those squares are so desperate to learn the material. Besides, your mixtape is fire and they’re missing out by not hearing it.
  • Walk directly in front of the professor. This makes it easier for the professor to notice you and helps to provide an additional ‘in’ for you. Furthermore, you won’t be wasting the time you’ve allotted to record your mixtape by showing up to their office hours. This will also absorb additional information from your professor preventing it from reaching other students, like a parasite for knowledge. Keep in mind that college is primarily a numbers game, so if you can manage to lower the class average enough, the professor will implement a curve and your grade will improve even more.

 

  1. Don’t show up for group projects. They can be another huge source of stress for any college student. They’re tricky to balance and seldom go well, so the best advice The Sundial came up with is not showing up to any meetings.

    • Make up excuses like “Sorry, I was napping,” “I was in a recording session for my mixtape,” or “I was too drunk to show up to our Wednesday afternoon meeting.”

    • Don’t do any of the work for the meetings that they will assign you. You’re an aspiring star student-musician, so you’re too good for the menial tasks they’ve given you; you deserve better.

    • Complain to your professor that your peers are not doing enough work and that you are doing more than your fair share. This is another great sabotage technique that overloads other people with work. They will become too busy to focus on their other classes and thus their lives start to fall apart; your grades will look incredible by comparison.

 

  1. Don’t do any homework or do it twice. Homework is tricky. A lot of research went into finding the best advice for it, and our top researchers came up with two things:

    • Make it as sloppy as possible so that your professors and TAs cannot read it. It will buy you more time to do it right.

    • Do your homework twice, because it’s worth double the points. This is a very little-known flaw in the GPA system that can boost your final score anywhere from 100-200%. Imagine an 8.0 on your college transcripts, can you imagine how impressed your future employer will be?

 

  1. Ignore tests or be a total distraction during them. Test are bullshit and you shouldn’t have to put up with them. You’ve already demonstrated you know the material by doing double the homework (bonus if you’ve referenced the material in your mixtape; they should’ve heard it by now).

    • The research shows that showing up to a test is much like showing up to a normal class (see advice for showing up to class late. If you’ve been taking notes, this shouldn’t be too hard).

    • Make sure your cell phone goes off during the test. This is key to making you look important, and everyone knows the most important people in history have done well on all of their tests, so by association you should too. You can either pay your friend twenty bucks to call you (research shows that this is the optimal amount) or set an alarm to go off, if you’re cheap. Make the alarm obnoxious it can be any of the following:

    1. Fire Alarm
    2. Police/Ambulance/Firetruck sirens
    3. Tornado Sirens
    4. Your school’s emergency alert system

These will instill fear in enough people to the point where they get up and leave the classroom.

 

WARNING THIS NEXT TIP SHOULD ONLY BE ATTEMPTED UNDER EXTREME CIRCUMSTANCES

 

  • If nobody has noticed how important you are, pull the fire alarm. This will definitely let people know how important you are. The professor will come over to talk to you and they might even give you some test answers. If they ask you why you did it, just respond “‘My mixtape is fire. I needed to pull the alarm to tell everyone about it.”’

 

  1. Network in the middle of class. The study found that networking is crucial to do in college and beyond. Doing this in the middle of class or during a test can be a great way to sabotage the grades of others.

    • Make sure they know how awesome you are. Talk about how perfect you are, your mixtape, and how great your [in]significant other is (make one up if you don’t have one). As long as it’s not relevant to the class material, networking should provide the perfect distraction.
    1. Talking about how great you are will lower your peers’ self-esteem, and this will make them more susceptible to peer pressure. This allows you to get them addicted to drugs and will eliminate competition in your field of study, virtually guaranteeing you a job after college.

 

  1. Spend more time on your phone in class. Technology is a great thing to learn from, and your phone is connected to the information super highway with a far greater pool of knowledge than any single person could have access to. You can learn to Photoshop a degree and credentials, pretend you know everything about that degree, and then reap all of the benefits without having to do any of the work. This plan is generally foolproof. If you find yourself in trouble, you can always bribe a judge with all of the money you’ve made in the career you have faked your way into.

 

  1. Stalk your professor for their phone number. When your professor eventually “gives” you their number because you two have become so close (you may have to steal it off the internet), call them any time between 2:30 and 4:00 A.M. They’ll love how close you think you two have become and  your professor will know how much you care about their class. After all, you’re willing to call them at any time during the day. If they don’t see this they’ll change their phone number so their students won’t call them anymore. This is another great form of sabotage that allows you to absorb all of the resources from you professor while other students don’t have any.

 

  1. Plagiarism is key. You came here looking for advice, which means you may or may not have struggled with a paper. Even The Sundial Elite™ have struggled to write at some point, so you’re in good hands.

  1. Learn another language, yes, Pig Latin counts.
  2. Look for papers about your essay topic in that language.
  3. Copy and paste that essay into google translate it.
  4. Slap your name on it and call it a day.

Copyright software only checks for the languages they code in and usually cannot translate it, so there is little to no chance you’ll get caught. If you do, you can use those Photoshop skills you learned earlier in order to fake transcripts to get to another school.

 

  1. Commit a white collar crime. As a last resort, if all of the plagiarism, Photoshop, and interruption doesn’t work; bribe a judge or don’t pay your taxes. You’ll most likely get life in federal prison, which, and they don’t tell you this in college, is really reminiscent of your best middle school experience. Three meals a day, recess, and a guaranteed boyfriend/girlfriend. Plus cliques or “gangs,” (research shows that they are colloquially referred to as gangs) are great for making new friends and will keep you from being bullied in prison. Since prisons are paid for by tax payers, you basically get to live for free and won’t have to worry about anything. All of these convoluted GPA strategies, and group projects won’t really matter anymore, and soon, it will be just you, your significant other, and a nice cinder block wall.

 

As we approach the new semester let’s use this research to better our grades, our future, and ourselves. After all, no one is perfect, and everyone can try harder to be a better student.

-Adam Hribar, Contributor