It’s Sunday evening. Jeffrey Tanner has 250 pages of reading due for his American Institutions class tomorrow, and he’s only skimmed through the first 10.
But “The Simpsons” is on. After that is “Malcolm in the Middle.” And his friends might come over to play Play Station.
“Yeah, those 250 pages just?well, they just aren’t going to get read by 8:35 tomorrow morning,” Tanner said.
Tanner’s situation is not an uncommon one at college. Many students wriggle through their classes doing only half to none of their scheduled reading, according to a new study by the National Institute of Nosy Statistics.
“Not doing your homework is a big problem in higher education,” said the institute’s Professor R. Richard Richards. “According to our study, 75 percent of teachers assign work that will never appear on a quiz, test or exam. Students quickly figure this out and trim the fat, as it were.”
“Yeah, I do my homework,” Tanner said. “Well, as much as anyone else. I mean, dude, a lot of the study they want me to read is really, really small print. It’s just not worth it. There’s 400 kids in the class, so it’s pretty good chances somebody’s read whatever professor what’s-her-name is talking about.”
“Well, I don’t really study much,” Tanner said during an extended “Final Fantasy XIIXCVM” session one evening. “But I still squeak by. I’m more of an audial learner than a visual learner. That’s just how I am.”
Boasting a robust 1.78 GPA, Tanner has recently become a sociology major.
Wanting to become a fighter pilot in the U.S. Air Force, Tanner began his coursework as a mathematics major four years ago. Since then he’s wandered from major to major, unable to commit to a prescribed course of study for more than two or three semesters.
While not as serious an offense as plagiarism, neglecting homework takes its toll. The institute suspects that the amount of slacking off students engage in has increased 11 to 12 percent in the past 20 years.
When asked how thorough the institute was with their study, Richards looked at the ground, shuffled his feet and mumbled, “Well, we talked to a couple of guys at school?We did our homework, you can be sure.”
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