David Goes to College: The Decline and Fall of a GPA, Vol. I

Roughly four years ago, I arrived on the campus of the American University in Washington, DC, with the wide-eyed wonder of a college freshman, ready to take on the world one midterm at a time. Signing up for classes in political theory, comparative political science, international relations, history, and law, David Wile was going to march into the halls of the Ward Circle Building and show this town something it ain't never seen before. Four years, forty classes, twelve countries, 72 all-nighters, 43 hangovers, and two jobs later, ecce homo, battered, beaten, world-weary, with upwards of $2800* in fines owed to the American University library and using Latin in a blog post while legitimately trying to pass off "la isla del Easter" as Spanish for Easter Island on an exam.

"Hey David, what in the hell happened?" you might find yourself asking, and yea, I too have found me posing such a question myself. Well, let's go back to the beginning and see if we can gather any clues from there.

The Beginning
Our story begins with my fabled entrance onto AU's campus. Herald angels proclaimed my arrival to the breathlessly anticipating university; a new star shone from the heavens to announce my prophesied coming; and, lo, three kings bedecked in the grandeur of the ancient Orient appeared to bestow upon me the gifts of royal birth. 

Like so.

My first week of classes, suffice to say I had no idea what was going on in school. I was showing up to class expecting to get taught me some facts and stuff, and instead everyone was talking to the professors like they already knew all the facts I wanted to be told. This situation wasn't ideal, and after about two weeks, I did some independent research to figure out exactly why I was apparently the dumb one in class. In the course of this investigation, I discovered that some professors don't just tell you your homework at the end of class; they put it in the syllabus, and expect you to have done by a certain date whatever reading assignments had magically appeared on this omniscient sheet of paper. My classmates weren't geniuses, they just seemingly intrinsically knew how to do homework. This little discovery would have a massive impact on my future college career.

Anyways, after this initial bump in the road, I settled into somewhat of a routine. I read for the two classes I thought I had to read in, and in the other classes I waited till the day before the exams to flip through the books and get a general sense of the learning material. As hard as it may be to believe, I never went to sleep after 4 in the AM; no all-nighters, no two-thirds-nighters, nothing past your run-of-the-mill half-nighter. In bed by 4, awake by 9:10 AM for the 9:55s I had 4 times a week. Yes, I even took 9:55s. Please, adoring millions, just bear with me. I know this insight into my past might irreparably shatter that unconditional respect and love you previously had for me, but I just couldn't bear to keep it a secret any longer. There you have it: my dark, tormented past. It's just one more lie I don't have to live anymore.

During that semester, I earned myself a 4.00 GPA. I also checkmated a computer chess program on its highest level. Neither of those achievements would ever happen again. This retrospective aims to determine why such was the case. Did I stop trying as hard? Did I lose focus? Did I get a very large and shiny television set? Did college make me dumber? Did I perhaps subordinate academic endeavors to straddle that thin line between awesome and alcoholism? Hypothesis: Yes.

But let's return back to the facts we're studying. After that first semester, I assumed that getting an A in a college course just meant handing in all of your work with a decent level of competence. Despite all evidence to the contrary over the next 7 semesters, I would maintain that assumption with the blind confidence of a post-epiphany Oedipus asked to gauge his certainty that he banged his mom on a scale of 1 to eye-gouging.

"Well, 9.5, but I just rounded up."

Those next 7 semesters would systematically kick my ass. 

The Decline: Part I
Upon starting my second semester at AU, I convinced myself that I was able to attend class five days a week. This completely unjustified confidence would prove my undoing. With 9:55s 3 times a week and 11:20s on the other two days, I was waking up on the AM side of the day far too often for my own health. That fifty minutes of class on Wednesday destroyed the easy-going life of my first semester. 

I began staying up later and later. It became a common occurrence to go to sleep at 6:30 AM, watching the sun rise over the smoke stacks behind Anderson Hall. Under these inhumane circumstances, my GPA took its first hits. 

The first one came in the last week of classes. Having stayed up for a majority of the night working on my part of a group presentation for Macroeconomics, I rolled over the next day as the clock struck noon. This was unfortunate, because my class began at 11:20. I put clothes on and, breaking my personal prohibition against running in public, sprinted across the entire campus from Anderson through dozens of touring families to the second floor of Ward. I got to class right after my group had finished presenting. Whatevs, I didn't need that 15% of my grade. 

The next hit happened during finals week. Instead of a final for my Research Methods class, we just had to e-mail in the paper we'd been writing that semester on Blackboard. With my paper due Tuesday May 1st, I decided to get a head start on it that Sunday night. For some reason or other, my laptop couldn't get onto the Internet, so I had to go downstairs to the Anderson Computing Complex to do my work. Checking my e-mail before starting the paper, I see this little gem:

Hi David,

Your final paper is not on Blackboard - did you post it?  Please let me know what's up, and email me a copy ASAP.

- Prof. Robinson  

Apparently under the confusion that May 1st was that Tuesday, I had completely forgotten that May 1st was the Friday before, and I was calmly writing my paper not 2 nights before it was due, but 3 nights after. Well color me flabbergasted.

I'm not proud of my reaction in the ensuing minutes. As nonchalantly as I handle the daily shitstorm of my life now was as panicked as I handled this one then. Real talk, if that depiction of studious freshman year David made you queasy, by all means, scroll through the rest of this section with your eyes closed until you feel safe and grab a cold shower. If you do bravely read on, I just want you to imagine the D. Wile you know and love typing these actual words to another adult human person and laugh to your heart's content. Let's just hope we can still look each other in the eyes afterwards.

My first response wasn't so much an e-mail as a literary study on the onset of hysterics:

OH MY GOD, I THOUGHT IT WAS DUE ON TUESDAY. I'll finish it right now and get it up to you. I'm so sorry. Oh my god, I'm terribly sorry. Oh no...

followed immediately by this free verse masterpiece: 

Also, my Internet has not been working for the last three days (it's not the AU network, it's just my computer, and no one's been able to fix it), so I haven't been able to get online at all. (This is completely true. I'm in the Anderson Computing Complex right now because I needed to get on that site with the blank maps, and I can't get to it from my laptop. It's also not very good that I just had a slight meltdown after reading that here...)

I wrote the eight pages of my paper in about 3 hours, and put it on Blackboard. The next day, my professor responded in a much more subdued manner than I'd responded to her and, apparently unaware I'd already sent the paper in, asked when I'd get the paper in to her. My response apparently doubled as an exercise in Kerouac-ian stream-of-consciousness prose:

I put it on Blackboard last night at like 9:30-ish (I did the data analysis in like an hour and a half). If the penalty doesn't change and the fact that I'm not sure if I wrote most of it in actual sensible words would make the grade even worse, I can look over it and turn it in again later tonight. Although I also might not have too much time, considering I have 2 exams tomorrow, I don't own the internet at the moment, and I pretty much need a 100 on one of those exams to not destroy my grade (that's the class the presentation for which I slept through - I can't begin to describe to you how proud of myself I am this semester...). So it might just end up working out that what I slapped together on Blackboard last night remains my final.
So I guess the better question is, when do you want my paper? Because depending on that answer, you either have it already or you don't. 

Freshman David was apparently a huge fan of the ellipsis-closed parentheses combo.

Anyways, as luck would have it, I must've gotten that 100 on my Macro exam, because I got a B+ in that class when a B was the highest grade I could get after I sacrificed 15% of that grade to the sleep gods. As luck wouldn't have it, I was deduced 10 points from my final in Research Methods for handing it in late. Even despite this penalty, all of the grades posted on Blackboard still averaged to a 91, A-. And even despite this average, I got a B+ in the class because "Participation" is a bullshit little loophole in the grading system designed to let professors give you whatever grade they want within a 10% radius.

Thus my initial universal theory of college, that if assigned work is done with a minimal level of competence then it will be deemed an A, remained unchallenged because my own incompetence rendered me unable to meet that initial condition.


Continue to David Goes to College: The Decline and Fall of a GPA, Vol. II.




*Ed.'s note: It's more like $30, but the American University library seems to be under the faulty impression that I have lost one of their hallowed Dell Ass-sucks from the stone age, and wants to charge me a market rate of $2700 for it. The American University library also seems to be under the faulty impression that "market rate" is the price at which a laptop was bought 6 years ago cubed.