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

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

The Decline: Part II
Coming back to AU sophomore year, I moved into the suites of Centennial. By days, I watched television in the lounge. By nights, I pretended to do work in the study cell. By mornings, I slept until class started. Back to taking classes only four days a week for reasons of mental health, I had Mondays off. I joined APO and ventured to grow an oregano plant. I would competently hand in the vast majority of my work on time that fall semester. That semester would infamously culminate in a 17-hour study cell binge during which, inspired by Shakira's passionate imagination of the ideal of personal independence as a caged female wolf, I wrote a 10-page paper for Ancient Political Thought on Plato's references to animals in The Republic. These are groundbreaking contributions to global scholarship, people.

Upon the completion of this monumental task, I survived the first semester of sophomore year. I assume since I had yet to get an A-, karma stepped up and doled me out four of those badboys that semester. Still, karmic mediocrity was not enough to dispel my universal theory of college.

My next semester was enough to dispel my universal theory of college. For the first time, I began arriving habitually late to classes, specifically my Calculus II class. Fortunately, I was flipping fantastic at Calculus II. Just to rub it in Calculus' face, I showed up 20 minutes late to our last test, finished it first, and got the highest grade in the class. Despite my best efforts, Calculus could not destroy my GPA.

You know what else I thought I was flipping fantastic at? Shakespeare. You know who wasn't so pleased with my knowledge of Shakespeare? My Transformations of Shakespeare professor, who saw fit to give me a B. In a General Education requirement class, mind you. About fucking Shakespeare. I interpret scenes from Shakespeare in my spare fucking time. To myself. Two weeks of this class were spent on Christ-shitting metrical scansion. Let me tell you how much I need to be taught about metrical scansion. Years later, in my capacity as a Starbucks barista, I ran into my TA for that course, who told me that professor had been single-handedly trying to deflate what she perceived to be the rampant grade inflation at AU. Well thank you very much, professor, but I can do that my damn self.

Also that semester, this:

Yours truly, all up and studying on his Contemporary Political Thought.

Thus, one-professor crusades emerged as an unaccounted-for variable in my universal theory, which suddenly needed some revising.

That revising would not come the next semester, where I not only still neglected to account for the professorial madness variable, but I also failed to take into account the living off campus variable. Faced with a 42-inch television screen and an XBox with games and controllers and what-have-you strewn about it, my life became a strange mix of House reruns, Law and Order: SVU reruns, and FIFA. It wasn't necessarily a pixelated soccer player condescendingly yet endearingly solving rape-based medical mysteries, I just watched a lot of TV and played a lot of video games. Sleep, naturally, took a backseat to these noble endeavors.

Meanwhile, I dealt with the unfortunate circumstance that, in another Gen.-Ed. course called Dissident Media, my professor apparently took issue with the idea of writing. For example, his exams were 80% fill-in-the-blank tests, with the blanks completing quotes from the text. As in, we were expected to have the books memorized. Only twenty percent of the exams was an essay, meaning the only part of the test which required analytic thought and interpretation of the reading material amounted to 1/5 of the overall grade for both of the course's exams. 

He further proved his antipathy towards writing per se in his critique of a paper of mine wherein I was prompted to argue against capital punishment. My passionate report proving that the very nature of the capital punishment sentencing process constitutes a violation of the ideals of due process and the rule of law protected in our American Constitution left my professor coolly unfazed. Instead, he'd rather I'd made my section on wrongful convictions, which have historically convinced all of no one to abolish the death penalty, the focus of my paper.

Do you remember who this guy was? Check your Facebook status from last September. I'll wait.

Good thing AU makes Political Science majors take Communications courses, is what I'm getting at. Regardless, Professor Loves-Arbitrary-Government-Rule, as I so pithily call him, lived up to his nickname and arbitrarily gave me a B- for the class.
It's cool, I'm not bitter or anything. 

Didn't even want that Honors credit.

After this point, I simply lost all respect for college as an institution. I could not bring myself to care about whatever subjective grade a professor deemed to put at the end of a semester's worth of work. Probably less than a quarter of the grades I actually got, both good and bad, actually showed the percent of that course's material which I learned. Under this outlook, for the first time in my life I was psychologically unable to equate lower grades with academic or intellectual failure. Both my liver and my GPA became the collateral damage of my new Weltanschauung.
  
The next semester, I moved my dicking around to Germany, where I proceeded to get lost and lose things at pretty much the exact same rate I did in the U.S. Aided by a just and loving God, I managed to get to a 9:00 AM German class four times a week within at least 30 minutes of it starting for the entire semester. Apparently, however, being too exhausted to speak is no excuse not to do so in class, and I finished with a B+ in the class despite acing every test and exam. Fortunately for my GPA, it was a three hour-per-day class, so that one B+ counted for six credits.

My other classes were decidedly simpler until the last week of school, when I found myself needing to write 3 papers amounting to 34 pages due within 3 days of each other. Fourteen of those pages were to be written in German. For four days and four nights, I slept for no more than 6 hours total. In what would prove my GPA's last gasp at greatness, I got A's in all three of these courses. Like the Spartans at Thermopylae, like the Light Brigade at Balaclava, like the ANZACs at Gallipoli, my GPA fought on, courageously aware of the imminent onslaught it faced.

The Fall
Returned from my time abroad, with a part-time job, a full-time course load of 17 credit hours, and a magically transformed sense of responsibility which legalized the purchase and consumption of alcohol in these United States, something had to give. Apparently, those somethings were sleep and sanity.

Aside from the fact that most days my 6 hour shift at Starbucks was literally 12 times longer than I'd slept that night, I was also taking more credit hours than I'd ever taken before. These were bold times. I'd end up with a B in my Presidency course because I never bought the books and 20% of the grade was based on reactions to the readings submitted online, so yeah, my bad, GPA. I also habitually napped through my Calculus III course since it was scheduled in a particularly unfortunate spot just long enough after work where I could consistently convince myself I could fit in a half-hour nap, but not long enough after work where I could fit in the 6-hour sleep that nap would inevitably become. Naturally, I neglected to hand in an assignment which amounted to 5% of my grade because I only knew it existed once the professor returned it to the class. Luckily for me, I'm so balls-blazingly astounding at Calculus that I got myself an A in spite of my own ineptitude. 

But the real trouble this semester came in a class known only as the Honors Senior Seminar. A research class designed for those pursuing full-year capstone projects, the Honors Senior Seminar required essentially two things that I fundamentally lack as an individual: time, and the ability to come up with project topic ideas. Trying to get my Thomas Hobbes on, I decided that my capstone could be me just spit-balling out a personal theory of politics. You know, nothing grandiose.

Whoa there, Thomas Hobbes, spell much?

Strangely enough, political theory projects tend not to mold to the traditional project stages of "lit reviews" and "project proposals" and all that noise, so everything I was doing was pretty incompatible with any actual project idea I might have. Both my professor and my capstone advisor pointed this out to me at around the same time, about 4 days into November, which was interesting seeing as that was 4 days after the last day to drop courses. Undaunted, I dropped that badboy like a sick beat and expected it to work itself out. 

It most certainly did not work itself out. My ass got itself an X in Honors Senior Seminar. An X. They gave me a grade 18 letters below an F just to convey the sheer magnitude of my failure. That single X brought my entire college GPA down a whole .09, and there was nothing the three A's I made the rest of that semester could do about it. 

I still had the next semester to make up for that X, although I decisively did not use it in such a manner. I made the mistake of having no two classes scheduled consecutively, meaning I was on time for at most 15 class periods the entire semester. Punctuality completely escaped me for my two earliest classes, my 10:20 AM Modern German Short Stories course and my 1:10 PM graduate level Foundations of Mathematics course. I got B's in both of these courses because, let's not kid ourselves here, turning in homework is just not my forte.

Even in my political theory course, The Idea of America in European Political Thought, I only managed an A-. I'll assume this happened because my general tardiness saw me miss two of the weekly quizzes on the readings and handing in a progress report for my term paper 5 days after it was due knocked an otherwise A work down to a C. 

Of course, in the aftermath of that X in Honors Senior Seminar, I still had to churn out a capstone project if I wanted to graduate with University Honors. Still in need of a topic since my last one proved untenable, my advisor suggested that I write it in conjunction with the term paper for the political theory class mentioned above, which I happened to be taking with him. Considering my knowledge of the German language, he proposed the topic "The Idea of America in Austrian Political Thought," and I thought that sounded pretty good. I planned to write 5 pages a day for 5 days a week for 2 weeks, and attempted to clear my schedule to do so, even going so far as finishing a take-home math test at least 3 nights before it was due. This capstone was serious business.

I failed incredibly at this goal. Instead, in the first week I wrote all of 5 pages, leaving about 45 pages to write in the next week. I developed a Pavlovian response to my capstone to the extent that opening Microsoft Word made me instantly exhausted. I couldn't write more than 2 pages at a time lest I die or go insane. I was struggling.

And then came David Time, the shortest time-span possible wherein I can do all the work allotted to me for a particular assignment and still have it in on time, a divine gift I'd first recognized in the morning glow of the Centennial lounge. With the project due at 3:00 PM Monday, David Time apparently started on midnight Friday night, when I awoke from a five-hour capstone-induced nap on the couch with only 17 pages of capstone and five of six more sections of outline to cover.

Over the next 63 hours, with nothing but the sweat of my brow and the raw intellect of my brain interpreted through the nimble movements of my sweet, sweet fingertips, I wrote me 35 pages of capstone in a Five Hour Energy-fueled rampage, completing my 52-page opus. I went to campus to go to my Short Stories class, the last of my college career, and from there I went to the Tavern to write the conclusion and the bibliography. By this time, my brain was so fried that I had no conception of basic alphabetical order and put all my F's after my H's. Talk about mortifying.

I handed my capstone in at 3:12 PM, which rounds down to 3:00. Somehow, despite never getting anywhere near revising or even giving the first draft the old once-over, there were only 4 typos in the entire deal, and everything more or less made enough sense to elicit a solid A from my advisor.

I celebrated this monumental achievement through a series of Tweets all up on my Twitta page of capstone-related puns.

The culmination of my college career, everybody.

My genius confirmed, I still stumbled my way to my lowest GPA in any semester that didn't involve a letter grade beyond T. My total GPA dropped slightly more than .20 points throughout senior year, which saw four of my six lowest grades in college.

Here we bring our study to a close. I've had less sleep in the last four years than a Guantanamo inmate and gradually lost both my faith in greater truths and my ability to take anything people do seriously. My GPA has slowly stumbled from perfect to near perfect to above average to slightly above average. Freshman year I would panic when I missed classes; senior year I congratulated myself for going to every class I had in any particular day. I emerge the ruins of a high school graduate, more aware of myself, striving to strive for something despite all existential evidence not to. Hell if that's not worth $300,000, I don't know what is.

Not this materialistic hocus-pocus, that's for sure.

So in conclusion: hypothesis confirmed.

Epilogue
Oft have I said, in my bitching about college, that I could count all the things I learned on one hand. I now present that list of the things I learned in college. 

1. Read Nietzsche
2. Botswana's democracy is properly understood as a bureaucratic authoritarianism
3. Watch the Russian version of King Lear (1971) and Fritz Lang's M 
4. Comfort is the enemy of human freedom
5. A smattering of German vocabulary and grammatical structures

That oughtta save you the 300 grand.