It is officially T-minus-one week until finals. For anyone who is not a physics major, “T” stands for “time” in this equation. I hope that helps on your exam.

Finals correlate with the holiday season, which is fitting because both instances bring out the best and the worst in people. On the plus side, students expand their minds to achieve a passing grade while people reunite with their families to celebrate love and the spirit of giving. On the negative side, students spend 10 hours a day in the library to achieve a passing grade while people murder each other in the parking lot of a Best Buy because someone bought the last copy of Rock Band 3.

Because exams can be such a stressful time for students who already have a lot on their minds— such as what flavor vodka would taste best in the lime and cherry Jell-O shots for the Christmas party— I have come up with a short checklist for any Grand Valley State University student who is overwhelmed by the imminent doom of finals. Please note that I am not known for my sarcasm.

* Don’t study. I know this may seem like a no-brainer (haha, pun …), but no one has ever really benefited from actually learning the material we were supposed to keep up with during the entire semester. And, from what I understand, teachers have stopped doing the whole culminating exam thing that utilizes an entire semester’s worth of information in one test.

If you haven’t heard yet, don’t feel bad; it just happened recently … like this semester. Blame Obama.

* Do everything in one day. If you have three or more exams on any day during exam week, you can reschedule one. Why? So it’s less convenient, I guess. It doesn’t make any sense to spread the week out more evenly.

In fact, it would make more sense to do the opposite. One solid block of five exams may mean no time to eat food, but it also allows you to put all your eggs in one basket (you should then count all your chickens before they hatch).

Why not stack everything on Monday? You’ll just have the rest of the week to incessantly tease your friends and roommates about their idiotic choice of a regular distribution of work?

* Don’t take care of yourself. Now that you are not going to study and will take all your exams within the span of 10 hours, it may be easy to forget that your well-being comes first. Keep it that way. Getting six to eight hours of sleep a night and proper nutrition for your health is a myth, similar to alcohol destroys brain cells … or The Odyssey.

I hope that helps on your exam.

So with that, you have everything you need to know about how to ace your finals better than Andre Agassi. Now that you have a week to blow off, you might as well return your textbooks to the bookstore and run out to Best Buy. I hear they’re running low on Rock Band 3.

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