East Greenwich High School Spectrum, December 1989

Why study?

by Andrew Shearer

After several years of working undercover, posing as a normal high school student (and failing), I am ready to announce my earthshaking findings. The school faculty has been carrying out a massive organized propaganda campaign for many years, and it is my job to expose it.

Most teachers would have us believe that the grades we get on tests are directly proportional to the time we spend studying for them. The more the time spent studying, they say, the higher the grade will be. My research has shown this to be absolutely false.

Collecting my data over a four-week period, I found that I hadn't studied for many tests because I knew they were going to be fairly easy, and my grade was reasonably high even though I hadn't studied. Conversely, many tests for which I had spent long nights studying were incredibly tough tests on which I didn't do well anyway.

Since no studying generally brought high grades and a lot of studying low ones, my conclusion is that grades are inversely proportional to study time! Contrary to teacher propaganda, the longer the time spent studying, the lower the grade will be! Needless to say, this makes studying pretty dumb.

This is certainly the death blow for study halls. Thank goodness for time-intensive extracurricular activities which take away dangerous hours which could have been used studying!

In view of this information, I decided to conduct an experiment. If studying brings lower grades, why study at all? (My sister enthusiastically joined the experiment, showing her great spirit for the progress of science.) Unfortunately, the experiment has not worked.

It seems that with a constant study time (none), the entire range of grades is produced, from reasonably high on easy tests to reasonably low on hard ones. One amount of study time can produce any grade. Based on this evidence, my conclusion is that grades bear no relation at all to study time.