It’s that time of year again when the weather turns warm, the birds come back north, and the Red Sox find a way to disappoint their fans despite spending $160+ million on grown men who run around in their pajamas. Finally, the sun is shining again, it’s light after 5pm, and breasts no longer cruelly hidden under sweaters. Just when it seems that things are finally looking up, along comes school to ruin everything. With great weather come final papers on Great Expectations. But fear not, the Mass Media is nothing if not helpful, and so here are some tips and tricks for preparing for finals.

Group Projects:

Group projects can go one of two ways: most likely, you’re in a terrible group where you have to do all the work because your partners, who are posting things to Facebook constantly haven’t responded to an email since the Bush Administration. On the other hand, if you’re lucky, you’re paired with a bunch of goody two shoes who have never turned in anything less than a week early.

If you’re on the former, it’s not necessarily as bad as it seems. You’ll get a chance when you turn your project in to throw your teammates under the bus, and if the professor is sympathetic, you’ll be handsomely rewarded for all the hard work you put in. If you’re in the in latter group, you’re living the dream. Your final project will be done for you, as long as you strategically drag your heels and just update Facebook instead of responding to emails.

Final Papers:

Let’s be honest, Courier New 12 point is clown shoes high school BS for lengthening page counts. The same goes for fiddling with the margins, or doing 2.3x line spacing. With more papers being submitted electronically, it’s easier and easier to detect these amateur manipulations. Instead, what you need to focus on is learning how to write without saying anything. Use lots of big words to provide a higher level of obfuscation and distraction to the reader while maintaining the impression that your sentence carries inherent weight and meaning. (The preceding sentence was a good attempt stylistically, but unfortunately, it had a point to it. Never have a point. I can’t stress this enough.)

If you can’t think of any other ways to say nothing without accidentally saying something, you can always use the old standbys of giant block quotes. These have the dual advantages of being essentially free words written by someone else, and they make your bibliography look more impressive. Finally, in a pinch, you can always include some charts and graphs. But be careful. You’ll want to use ones that already exist,  because you don’t want to wind up spending more time creating a graph than you would have just writing an extra paragraph.

Final Exams:

If you’ve been going to class all semester and know the material forwards and backwards, you’re all set. Take a walk outside, have a picnic in the grass – either way, you’ll do fine. If, however, you are the 99% of students, and assumed that simply going to class was good enough, regardless of what you did there (why pay attention when you could play Angry Birds?), you’ve got two options: if you need the grade, prepare to cram like you’ve never crammed before. Load up on caffeine and Adderall, and bring your sleeping bag to the library.

If you don’t need a good grade, there’s really no point putting in the work now, because let’s face it, cramming has worked exactly zero times ever. Might as well play outside, sip Sam Summer on your back porch, and plot out what classes you’ll have to take in the fall to make up for the F you’re about to get. Hey, at least Fall Finals happen when it’s cold, snowy, and dark out, and not during perfect procrastinating weather.