5 Ways To Get Through Finals When You Haven’t Done Any Work All Semester

Wouldn’t college be so much more fun if you didn’t have to go to any classes? Stupid teachers with their stupid reading assignments and stupid end of the semester final exams. Shit. Is it May already? Do you have finals next week? Have you gone to any classes yet? OK, don’t worry, now’s not the time to panic. You think you’re the first college goof-off to have found themselves in this cliché end-of-the-year jam? You’re not. And there’s always a way out. Here are a few:

1. Don’t hand in your test

This works for final papers also. Basically, you show up for the test, and make sure to give the professor a really over-the-top compliment, something like, “Hey, that’s a really nice tie!” The point here is to sear your presence in the professor’s memory, so that way when you enact phase two of this plan, there won’t be any question as to whether or not you were really there.

Don’t hand in the test. Just pretend to work at your desk for a while, and when everyone starts handing theirs in, you just leave. After everybody gets their grades back, show up to the professor’s office and ask why you haven’t received yours yet. Chances are your professor will be horribly overworked, with something like five hundred tests or papers to grade within a one week time period. The professor will shuffle around his or her mess of files for a while before finally giving up. They’ll eventually point to a corner of their office and say, “Oh yeah, there it is. It’s … uh … you got a B.” Boom. Works every time.

2. Try sweet-talking the dean

For this tip, it really helps if your parents are super, super rich. Go to the dean’s office, give him or her a big sob story about how hard this semester has been for you, how you’re really under a lot of stress, that you worry you’re parents are going to kill you if you don’t get straight As. Then casually mention how your super rich dad was planning on leaving a huge donation to the school.

I promise you you’ll get an A. And while, like I said, it really helps if your parents are super rich, you could always just lie and hope that the dean never comes knocking on your door for that donation. What is he going to do, threaten to take your A away? Hint: always record your dean conversations on your phone, that way if there ever is a threat, you can blackmail him or her with your recording.

3. Get a hacker to change all your grades

Wasn’t there a scene from some movie where a guy was going to fail his classes, and then he got some hacker to weasel his way into the school’s computers late at night, and he just deleted the failing grade and replaced it with a 4.0? I can’t remember the details exactly, but is this something you might be willing to consider? Come on, if Chinese hackers can get into the Pentagon’s computers, there’s got to be someone out there who can make it happen for you.

But where are you going to find someone like that? Ten or twenty years ago, hackers were so much easier to spot in the wild. They wore long cool trench coats and futuristic sunglasses … think about how Neo and the gang dressed when they plugged into the Matrix. They’ve still got to be around somewhere. If you can find a good hacker, do it. This has got to be the easiest way to pass all of your tests.

4. Bomb threat

I’m in no way telling you to call in a bomb threat to your school so that way they can’t give the final exam. I repeat: I am not suggesting you call in a bomb threat. But let’s say that someone hypothetically kept calling in a bomb threat every time your professor tried to give the test, wouldn’t that make giving a final grade a little problematic?

You’d definitely get caught, and you’d probably go to jail. But you wouldn’t have failed your finals. Does one of those options sound better than the other? Man, I wouldn’t want to be in that position.

5. Study really hard

This one is a little old-fashioned, but you could always try the classic college all-nighter. Granted, if you haven’t gone to any classes all semester, if you’re starting basically from scratch, you’re going to find this approach challenging. You know that whole “it’s not a sprint, it’s a marathon” saying? Well now you’re basically going to have to sprint the entire marathon. Mentally, that is.

But it’s totally possible. You just have to really commit yourself to spending every waking minute for the next few days dedicated to reading and synthesizing a semester’s worth of information. You should be fairly well-rested, seeing as how you haven’t done any work yet. And those all-nighter college montages always seem to work on TV. So I think you’re good, you’ve got this, trust me. Good luck!