Tuesday, May 02, 2006

How to Take a Final Exam

1) Get up at 7:00 a.m.
2) Feel that pain in your stomach? That's a common reaction to excess adrenaline. Having evolved over eons to deal with "fight or flight" situations, the sympathetic nervous system isn't adapted well to grueling 8-hour take-home exams. Just get used to feeling like you are gonna throw up.
3) Drink Coffee and/or take some cold medicine--and make sure the active ingredient is "pseudophedrine."
4) Get to the lounge two minutes to 8 o'clock.
5) Find out that the "Free Coffee and Donutes from 8 to 10" are provided on a first come first serve basis.
6) Accept the fact that there are no more free donuts and very little coffee.
7) Download your exam file, print it out, find yourself a nice spot in the library/your dorm room/bedroom/prison cell, and settle in.
8) Spend the next hour and seventeen minutes "outlining" (read: spacing out).
9) Search the outline you downloaded from the Student Bar Association's website using Ctrl+F.
10) Search Term: "Constitution"
11) Spend two hours and twenty-eight minutes issue spottting, conceptualzing and actually outlining.
12) Get some more coffee/speed.
13) Bathroom break--be careful not to look in the mirror, you haven't properly groomed yourself in weeks.
14) Sit back down and spend thirty-five minutes typing up your answer.
15) Realize that you have just found at least four intentional and five unintentional tort claims in your admin test.
16) Cry.
17) Feel that pain in your lower back? It's mostly from the chair, but don't forget about your kidneys, they probably hurt, too--filtering out all that adrenaline can be taxing (and God knows that all the ephedrine/caffeine has effectively supressed your parasympathetic nervous system from properly reacting and lowering your adrenal levels).
18) Freak the fuck out.
19) Upload your exam six minutes late.
20) Drink yourself normal (careful, this could take years).
21) Go home and watch Apocalypse Now! to help yourself relax.
22) Stay up until 3 a.m., marveling at how effectively your adrenal system can counter the effects of voluminous amounts of vodka, beer, and generic Nyquil.
23) Philosophically and subconsciously dissect the charade of human existence, while playing "Tetris" on your laptop until 4:23 a.m.
24) Try to sleep.
25) Get up at 5:13 a.m. and do push-ups for forty-seven minutes straight.
26) Pass out.
27) Repeat steps 1-26 as necessary.

2 Comments:

Blogger super des said...

this worries me.

6:31:00 PM  
Blogger Radio said...

It's a partial dramatization.

6:38:00 PM  

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