First term junior year, I was taking Advanced Calculus for Engineers. The only classes I attended were the three quizzes. Since I hadn’t picked up the quizzes, I wasn’t sure where I stood. So I went to one class and after the ending bell I approached the Prof and the conversation went…
“Sir, I haven’t been to many of your classes and…”
“Yes, I did have the distinct impression I had never seen you before in my life.” Some professors actually remember when they were students.
“Uh… Yes. I have a schedule conflict with another class that has no textbook, so I had to go to that class to take notes.”
“Hmmm.”
“Uh, I was wondering how I was doing.”
He rummaged in his briefcase and then said, “Not well. You haven’t handed in any homework and your average for the first three quizzes is 44 points below the class average.”
That was somewhat worse than I had hoped, but it wasn’t completely surprising since I had not cracked the textbook yet. However, the conversation was not going well, so I was forced to bring out the A material and after ten minutes the Prof finally agreed to pass me if I passed the last quiz and the final. The night before the final I opened the book for the first time. By 6 AM I had read all the material and I concluded I had no chance whatsoever of passing the final. My roommate, P5, happened to have half of fifth of bourbon on his desk. I wasn’t a bourbon fan, but under the circumstances it seemed like a good idea at the time. (P5, by the way, eventually became a priest, left the priesthood, and then married an ex-nun, apparently to keep religion in the family.)
I went over to the final at 9 AM with a glass containing the last of the bottle. I looked curiously at the first problem and it seemed somewhat familiar. The final was open-book, so I paged through the text and found an almost identical problem as an example; only the numbers were different. I copied the book solution using the quiz numbers and used the old standby of “Solve for X” because I didn’t trust my arithmetic at that point. So, I looked at the next problem and it was also familiar. Same drill for it and all the other problems. I was done with the 3-hour final in 90 minutes, which was fortunate because I was out of bourbon.
The prof gave me a C. Ironically, that was one of the few courses I passed that term, and I flunked out. When I re-entered after the mandatory ten month hiatus, I was tempted to try the same fluid approach to unleashing my subconscious. However, I had so many zeros weighing down my cum that I had to maintain Dean’s List grades for the last two years to barely scrape by for graduation. I just couldn’t take a chance even though a clinical case study would clearly have been of great value to students everywhere. So for two years I went to class, did homework, and read the texts. (My graduating cum was 2.495, which rounded to the mandatory 2.50 for graduation, and I had to get extra hours added to my thesis to manage that so that I wouldn’t have to come back for another term.)
Thus, it is was no great surprise that Phi Kappa was on Academic Probation for twenty-eight consecutive terms and ranked dead last among all MIT living groups for twenty-six of them. Alas, things change. Today MIT is a zero tolerance dry campus and PK (now Phi Kappa Theta due to a merger with Theta Kappa Phi) wins awards for academic excellence. Those poor kids just don’t know what they are missing.