After four long months of classes, we’ve arrived at the one time each semester when students fixate on that single, elusive goal: cleaning our apartments. We clean because the alternative is studying for finals, which is, of course, what we should be doing. If the school required us to clean twice a year, we’d probably procrastinate by studying for finals. But we’re supposed to study, and so we clean.

The only people who actually study sufficiently are the good students. Good students are all a bunch of jerks, and I do not mind saying so in print, mainly because good students will never read this. They are busy studying, not reading some juvenile column in a supplemental issue of a college newspaper. This is what makes them good students in the first place. (EDITOR’S NOTE: Do not stop reading this newspaper.)

If you absolutely must study, I urge you to heed the following corollaries. I’ve been a student here for a long time, and I have compiled these through the arduous and time-consuming process of making them up right now.

Corollary 1: The parts of the textbook you decide aren’t important enough to review will always be on the exam.

Corollary 2: The parts of the book you spend the most time on will be compressed into a single multiple-choice question, and you will still get it wrong.

Corollary 3: The grade you think you got as you walk out of the exam room is inversely relational to the grade you will actually receive.

Corollary 4: But the student who does the best job undermining your confidence after the test will always get a worse grade than you.

Corollary 5: Unless you are a moron.

This is why, instead of regular studying, I recommend my patented “Five Minute Study Plan.” It gets your studying done in the time it takes to cook five batches of minute rice (not simultaneously) and is surprisingly easy. All you have to do is: nothing.

“Oh sure, I could study now,” is what you tell yourself when you are using my patented “Five Minute Study Plan,” “but does it really matter if I study now or start in five minutes? I believe I will start in five minutes.” By repeating this mantra every five minutes, you will never have to study. Sure, you’ll do poorly on the test, but it’s not like just five more minutes of studying would have made a difference. These are the rationalization skills that made me the sixth-year college student I am today.

I’ve also learned how to procrastinate in tiers. How it works is, instead of studying, I’ll decide to clean; but cleaning is boring too, so I’ll decide to go for a jog. But jogging takes effort, so before I head out for my jog, I play some Madden ’08. But video games can be frustrating, so before I finish it, I take a little nap: the fourth degree of procrastination. Of course, once my nap is over, I will get right back to that Madden game, so I can finish up that jog, so I can clean my apartment, so I can study. But first, I should probably get something to eat…

I no longer have to deal with undergrad exams, but I do get to tackle law school finals. In law school, final exams take 27 hours apiece, and you don’t get to use the bathroom. Also, each student is allotted four blinks that he may use in any way he would like throughout the exam: He may blink once at each of four intervals, if he prefers; or he may blink all four times at once if he sees a particularly daunting question. Of course, this is not such a bad policy; as our professors constantly remind us, when THEY went to law school, they were only allowed three blinks. (They also rode woolly mammoths to class.)

Law students spend months preparing for finals. Some of the hardest workers begin reviewing course material for their Contract Law final while still in middle school. In fact, to make sure the writing of this column wouldn’t interfere with my studying, I wrote it in 1988. But the sacrifice is worth it, because if I wasn’t in law school, I’d have a real job right now, which would be significantly worse.

So in conclusion, I would advise you not to spend too much time freaking out about finals. Even if you fail out of school, there are definitely ways to convince your parents to let you move back in. I suggest blackmail.