Copious number of finalists pick up their hardly-earned 2:1s
A week on from the end of the final term, hundreds of lazy Warwick graduates are celebrating that, against the odds, they have managed to obtain 2:1s in their degrees.
This news arrives despite confessions from many students of having completed ‘basically no work all year’, and, in some cases, having ‘only been to a couple of seminars’. Whilst particularly prevalent amongst the social sciences and humanities, this institutionalised academic apathy has also spread to ‘real’ (Thanks, Nicky Morgan – Ed.) courses such as Maths and Engineering. When asked how many seminars they had attended in the last three years, our entire sample of mathematicians replied with an unambiguous “fuck all.”
Many complained that they were completely unable to focus on their Facebook news feeds during seminars as their tutors ‘kept asking them stupid questions’
Such accounts have cast doubt upon the usefulness of taught classes in universities, with some experts now suggesting that seminars and lectures ought to be scrapped altogether and replaced with scheduled naps, or ‘pillow contact hours’. Henry Seminar and Jean-Jacques Lecture, the eponymous creators of famed old school teaching methods, were both, unfortunately, unavailable for comment, due in part to their non-existence.
One student also believed that the ‘monitoring points’ system designed to discourage repeated, unauthorised absence from classes was equally farcical, or ‘point’-less. “My mates and I actually made a game out of it”, he remarked. “It’s pretty straightforward to be honest. Whoever has the most monitoring points at the end of the year wins.” When asked which of his friends had won, the student told us: “Not sure. I’ll probably figure that out later”.
Even amongst those who did attend – so-called ‘point squanderers’ – disillusionment and dissociation were rife. Many complained that they were completely unable to focus on their Facebook news feeds during seminars as their tutors ‘kept asking them stupid questions’, often related to course material. Others criticised the university’s sub-standard broadband capabilities, which reportedly caused YouTube videos to downgrade to 480p for those in busy lecture theatres. “Hotspot-secure?” one delinquent youth pondered. “More like notspot-shit.”
In addition to calamitous attendance records, this year’s brigade of finalists have demonstrated a penchant for last-minute essay writing and submission. Despite having the entire academic year to write her 10,000-word dissertation, one Politics graduate started only 45 hours before the deadline (nothing on The Hoar’s 3-minute record – Ed). After writing about 4,000 words on the first day, she describes how she had no choice but to “polish it off with a cheeky all-nighter”, which soon turned into a morning of caffeine-induced psychosis.
“I don’t remember writing the last 10 pages”, she claims. “I was physically shaking from all the Pro Plus I’d taken throughout the night and by the morning it just felt like my hands were writing it for me. At one point I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror and then proceeded to spend 2 whole minutes pulling various contorted facial expressions in complete silence. It was fun, but I stopped because I became convinced that the person in the mirror was someone else.”
“I finally submitted it half an hour before the deadline. I still haven’t re-read any of it so fuck knows what’s in there. I got a 2:1 though.”
So there you have it. Whether or not this attitude serves our finalists well in the future is, frankly, unknown. Although to be honest, if I was to hazard a guess, I’d say that it won’t. University isn’t just about the grade you get at the end – it’s about the work ethic you adopt throughout, and the habits you pick up along the way. What habits did these people pick up? How to do the same amount of work as their peers in a shorter space of time? For those already familiar with Einstein’s theory of general relativity, we know that that’s impossible. These people are trying to prove the unprovable – that E does not equal MC2. It’s one thing to break the rules of university by obtaining a degree without doing work. But to break the rules of physics? I asked one physics student whether he thought this was possible. He said no. So, really, you’re all just wasting your time. Goodnight.