Students: Conning the Professor

“Grades are your means of getting into graduate school; your means of keeping your parents happy; your means of avoiding the Army,” says a student publication at the University of California at Berkeley. But, it adds with splendid candor: “Do not give the professor reason to suppose that your interest is in the grade. You must always act like an interested intellectual, no matter what your motive.” Here speaks an authentic voice of U.S. education, in contrast to the stately bromides of college presidents. It sums up the art of conning the professor for higher grades — a sick art that grows more feverish as more collegians compete for more degrees at ever more crowded campuses. Even school children get apprenticed in the technique in how-to-study manuals that warn “Study Your Teacher” and advise: “You have to work with people all your life; start making a science of it.”

Gone: The Short-Skirt Bit. The old apple has to be polished a little more discreetly than it once was. The sweet Southern thing who sighs, “Ah’ll do anything to get a good grade,” is now likely to be told: “Try studying.” Symbolic of the times, a Michigan State professor last year ruined the short-skirt bit by ordering all coeds to the back of the room. “I don’t let myself get close to any student,” says a grim Houston professor. “I try to look at all of them as enemies.”

Yet, faced with 700 yawning faces, the big-campus lecturer yearns for one passionate learner—and this is what the good con man impersonates. “The very first lecture, the one everybody cuts, is the most important in the course,” says a Wisconsin senior. Moving in fast, the con man lovingly establishes his own name with the prof. After that, says a Princeton honors student, one need only “sit in the first two rows of the lecture room and maintain continuous eye contact with the lecturer. Make him glad he’s looking at you. Give him that receptive gaze, which implies amazement at his genius and quiet excitement at the information being transmitted.”

Prof. Voltaire. At the University of Michigan, fraternity houses are stocked with not only old exams but also “teacher psych-outs”—dossiers compiled by A-students on professors’ likes and dislikes. This allows con men to lug around the profs favorite magazine, or to ape his lingo. If this fails, says a recent Michigan graduate, there is the “welfare approach” of pretending poverty by wearing “hand-pressed khaki pants” and asking the professor on the very first-day “Ah, how much did you say that textbook was?” As a Wisconsin con man puts it: “These days, if you’re not one up, you’re one down.”

Con men rely heavily on “respectful disagreement”—tantalizing the professor who pines for ardent student protest. Really daring grade grubbers go much farther. “If his poli-sci prof is an outspoken liberal,” says one Yaleman, “the imaginative con man adopts a fascist interpretation in his classwork. Since most profs like to compare themselves to Voltaire, they will give the Jittie fascist every benefit of the doubt.”

Run-of-the-mill flattery includes tape-recording the professor’s lectures, pretending to shift one’s major to his field, and inviting the wretch to speak at one sorority house after another. One Northwestern sociologist finds graduate students going in for the “Gemeinschaft attitude”—getting folksy through baby sitting, for example. This puts them on almost unassailable ground: “How can a teacher flunk someone his kids like?”

“A professor will write a paper for you if you just give him a chance,” says a Berkeley student tip sheet. “Take in a draft or outline, and tell him you are having trouble with it; then take his criticisms and comments to heart. This will eliminate midnight panic and at least one grade’s worth of errors.”

Excuses & Exams. Good conning necessarily includes a range of ingenious excuses. No. 1 seems to be infectious mononucleosis, which is hard to diagnose and can be feigned to excuse weeks of goofing off. One Yaleman comes down with it at exams, which he then takes in the infirmary with his notes under the mattress. A Chicago professor notes the prevalence of “unspecified emotional disturbances,” such as “the traumatic experience of a boy who, discovering his roommate was a homosexual, just wasn’t able to study.” Another up-to-date excuse, says the same professor, came from a lad who missed an exam and explained: “My roommate is going with a colored girl. Last night his father came to town to shoot the girl, and we were up all night barricading the door to keep him from her.”

Exam time gives the con man his last chance—and perhaps the best instructions on how to seize it came from David Littlejohn, who last year was a Harvard teaching fellow, and is now an assistant professor of English at Stanford. Littlejohn set out to rebut an annual Harvard Crimson piece on how to fool the grader on exams by “use of the vague generality, the artful equivocation, and the overpowering assumption.”

“Your only job is to keep me awake,” wrote Littlejohn. “How? By FACTS. Any kind, but do get them in. They are what we look for, as we skim our lynx eyes over every other page—a name, a place, an allusion, an object, a brand of deodorant, the titles of six poems in a row, even an occasional date. Name at least the titles of every other book Hume ever wrote; don’t say just ‘medieval cathedrals’—name nine. Think of a few specific examples of ‘contemporary decadence,’ like Natalie Wood.

“Keep us entertained, keep us awake.

Be bold, be personal, be witty, be chock-full-of-facts. I’m sure you can do it without studying if you try. We did.”