Man Up Your Final Exams

Take it early

 

“But,” you protest, “isn’t taking tests early something only nerds do?” You’d think so, wouldn’t you? Tell you the truth, that’s exactly what most professors think – which is why it’s so easy to take advantage of the situation.

When you take a test early, you usually have to schedule to take it during a professor’s office hours (if they offer to have you take an exam with another class, say you have another exam during that time).

As most professors’ offices are no bigger than a broom closet, taking the written exam inside one, while the instructor is there, is usually something of a practical impossibility. For this reason, many professors will simply give early test-takers the exam and ask them to find somewhere quiet on campus, take it, and return it to them within a certain amount of time.

See where we’re going with this?

Once you’ve got the test and the instructor is out of sight, the world is your oyster. Wanna call a friend and ask for help? Go ahead. Feel like getting online and looking up which year Beowulf was originally written, and in what language? Knock yourself out. Being academic and scholarly is nowhere near as important as looking academic and scholarly – if you seem to your professor like the type who loves learning so much that you find the concept of putting off the final to be absolutely repulsive, then they’ll show you trust and confidence – trust which you will, of course, immediately betray.

 

Sleep with your professor

 

If you have a female professor, you should already be hitting that shit – we should hardly have to tell you to bang her this late in the game. Still, just in case you’re not already living out the single most popular male sexual fantasy in existence, we’d advise you to get on it. Immediately.

Not only because you’ll have stories to tell your illegitimate offspring for the rest of your natural life, but because coitus with an instructor usually provides on access to their room or office; aka, where they keep their test files. Assuming she’s the type who likes to cuddle after (and as professors are a lonely lot to begin with, she’ll almost definitely want to cuddle after), you can wait until she falls asleep and help yourself to the exam.

Hell, even if you don’t get to the exam, it’s not like a professor who doesn’t respect the platonic nature of the student-faculty relationship is gonna fail someone she’s boinking; at the very least, she’d feel bad, and at most she’d endanger herself by putting you in a position to blackmail her.

That’s what we in the ‘biz call a win-win-win situation.

 

Cheat like a pro

WikiHow’s got a lot of really shitty strategies (honestly, who does the “hide a post-it note inside your shirt” thing anymore?), but there are, nonetheless, some clever methods of cheating which professors still haven’t caught onto. For instance:

Gum Wrapper: Before the test buy some gum. Not one in a package, but some that comes individually wrapped. Open the package and CAREFULLY unwrap a stick of gum. Take a small sheet of paper, write your info and put it under the gum, re wrapping the stick. Put it back in the pack on top take a few out so it looks like a pack you've had for a few days. During the exam, when the proctor isn't looking, eat the gum, read your info. Pretend to get tired of the stick and put it back in the wrapper so you "destroy" your cheat notes and thus don't get caught. Additionally, get a pack of gum that comes in a tin, like ice breakers sours gum/mints. Cut out a circular piece of paper the size of the tin and open the "to share" side to read the notes. Only have a few pieces of gum in there, though, so that you won't look suspicious when you throw it away. (Note: works even better under the padding of Altoids.)

And, of course, this video represents a pretty damned foolproof method of bringing in notes (unless your instructor forbids soft drinks in the classroom):

 

Take advantage of anonymity

This works even better if after shoving your test into the pile you grab the entire stack, throw it into the air, rip off your shirt, and then run out of the classroom screaming “VICTORY” at the top of your lungs.

When it comes to final exams, there’s literally nothing the professors can do in a situation like this – you just have to make absolutely sure your picture isn’t available anywhere on the university website, newspaper, or roster, and that you haven’t made a big enough impact throughout the semester to stick out in the instructor’s mind.

 

Breakfast: the most important meal of the day

Scientific studies have proven that if you go into an exam with a full stomach, your brain has the energy it needs to recall obscure facts and concepts much easier than it would on an empty stomach. That said, if anything’s worth doing, it’s worth doing with excess.

Treat your exam day breakfast in the same way death row inmates treat their last meal. Stuff down all your favorite foods within a two hour time period: steak, spaghetti, pizza, ham-and-cheese sandwiches, whatever. But be sure to wash the whole thing down with a bottle of Pepto-Bismol: you don’t want to interrupt your exam to blow chunks.

Carbohydrates and sugars will give you the energy you need, while meat will give you the genetic hunter-gatherer confidence necessary to take on any exam. After devouring an entire steak, it’s difficult not to feel like you could tear something apart with your bear hands: this applies not just to the physical world, but to the academic one as well.

 

“Don’t stress out before a test”

 

Current, student-friendly scientific research says that cramming the night before a test is not only totally unhelpful to fact memorization, but also puts a stress on the brain which will actually make you perform more poorly once the actual exam rolls around.

Translation: party motherfucking hard the night before your exam. Take it easy on the booze, obviously, but don’t hesitate to spend the last night before finals playing Xbox, watching football, having sex, or masturbating vigorously for hours at a time in lieu of someone to have sex with. Putting your mind (and genitalia) in a relaxed state of being will make you much more prepared and confident to take finals. Worrying is for sissies – real­ men look at finals in the face and laugh vigorously whilst eating a hamburger and banging two sauced-up sorority girls.