It's 5:00 AM on Friday, your roommate stumbles into the room, still probably drunk from the nickel he/she went to earlier and ready to tell you the story of how his/her night went from amazing to incredible after a fateful hookup finally happened at the bar. But you really don't care about any of this, because tomorrow is the second exam for your CHEM 1128 class (using Chem because it's a good example of teachers picking the absolute worst days for exams, and just designing the worst exams to begin with). You peer into your syllabus, which is still sitting in the front of your notebook, with maybe a few coffee stains on it, and it says that the exam is worth a whopping 25% of your grade.

But should this alarm you? Of course not. Because by logical standards, you should have been studying for this exam for the past week. In all of the seminars and workshops you attended since the first day of school, time management was preached to you as being an incremental thing, "oh you have an exam next week? why not study for it now?" So why didn't you study for it back then, because I think we all know that something you read a week ago is obviously going to be retained in your mind word for word.

You roommate's blabbering on about his/her escapades and you start reflecting on all the decisions you made in the past week, all the other commitments that you may have had and how all those seminars and teachers told you that this exam should be put above that because at the end of the day, the exam will essentially be designed to fail you.

But this doesn't stop anything, which is fascinating in particular. There's always rumors and whispers going around about school departments on probation, kind of like the academic probation we face after having to deal with their classes, but they never get in any trouble for that, and for years and years after they have been put on probation, nothing changes about how they run their class, if anything it is equally as bad and obnoxious to take that class on.

So it's something to worry and wonder about, where is the justice for the students, where is the fairness when it comes to the idea that some of these classes may actually have been designed to fail students and in the past there have been years that more kids have failed than have even passed. Doesn't that bother the administration?

Fairness is a very delicate ideal in schools and the whole idea of luck is something that is more embraced. Failing an intro course can lead to a student go through an identity crisis about what they even want to do with life, regardless of whether they would have aced the classes that were about to come ahead.

Or, you could just stop wondering, stop questioning, and just study a week in advance, and train your mind to retain perfectly whatever you read a week ago, today.