Ross Vs. College: A Battle to the Death

This post has all the excitement you could ever want to read about! Action*! Love**! Conspiracies***! Political intrigue****!

*math **love of money ***corporations taking my money ****No political intrigue

Close enough. Considering that my last post was all about money, it’s only fitting that my second further enumerates the respect and and appreciation I have for it. However, this will be more along the lines of how much I dislike parting from my hard-earned treasure trove of Washingtons than describing the disturbing money memos people make. Don’t worry, there will be more of those in the future.

Today I mention the sweetness of cold hard cash because there’s one thing in my life that steals it away from me at a fearful rate: college. That’s right, between the parasitic entity known as the Bursar and the horde of hooligans that call themselves “faculty,” I always have somebody taking my money for “educational purposes.” One particularly demanding scholarly program is called Pearson’s My Lab & Mastering, a devilish little online resource run by a multi-million dollar British publishing company called Pearson PLC. It’s a program that professors at any college can use to assign homework and tests, and it’s all done online instead of the classroom.

Sadly, this allows teachers to be extremely lazy. Pearson My Lab & Mastering allows them to put in little to no effort into either assigning or grading homework. It’s all taken care of by the site, and let me tell you the questions are jokes. You usually have unlimited attempts to repeat the homework questions until you get them right, and in some cases the tests too. Of course, it’s great if you don’t want to put much effort into assignments. Buuuut…

Really, my only complaint is its ridiculous price. I’ve spent upwards of $100 dollars on each one, and I usually have to get multiple ones a semester, since most of my teachers are fairly lazy slobs. I can’t condemn them too much for this, so am I. But, being your typical college student, spending money on such silly programs is almost too much to bear. Even Pearson knows this, which is why they offer a two week free trial of their service while you beg whatever loan sharks you can find for cash to pay it off. I usually make use of this option, to pretend for two weeks that I’ll get to keep my money this year.

When I signed up for my Microeconomics class on this little site, I noticed my professor had posted all the homework for the entire semester. This meant that each piece of homework and each quiz were available for me to start and submit at any time. Most professors make the homework available to the students only after they have lectured on it in class, but not mine. I had the option to do it all. Every piece. Right now if I wanted.

Ha! But that would be crazy. Why would anyone do all their homework in the first two weeks of classes?

……

Wait, I thought. If I did all the homework I would be assigned, right now, wouldn’t that mean that I wouldn’t have to buy the “MyEconLab” in two weeks? If all my homework was done, couldn’t I sit back and save the $65 dollar fee for the program? Sure, doing all that homework when I had no idea how to do it seemed an exhausting task, but spending that much money on three months of homework when I’d already bought way too many books was an even worse thought.

So I tried it. I tried to do all the homework early. I got pretty far, I managed to get almost half of it done actually. But the sheer amount of questions, even though I had unlimited attempts at answering them until I got them right, combined with the quizzes that I was pretty much guessing at, nearly broke me. One week in, I shelved my homework project for a later date.

All this brings us to the evening of February 5th. A night where I spend 7 PM to midnight working at the school library. Where I can, fortunately, spend hours doing homework. Hours. Coincidentally, it was the last day I had access to the free trial of Pearson’s lovable economics lab. An idea began brewing in my mind. Surely, surely I could revisit the scene of my intellectual slaughter and conquer those last 11 chapters. It really would be worth it, I told myself. So, at seven sharp, I seated myself at the computer to hammer out answers to all the questions and save myself a decent bit of dough.

2/5/15 7:06 PM: I open up the website containing my darkest economic fears. No, not my bank account. Pearson’s MyEconLab, the dragon I, as a knight of the realm, was sworn to destroy reared up before me, its eerie pale logo menacing me with its quiet watchfulness. It waited for me to make the first strike, which I did. I hovered over the “Login” button and launched a click heard ’round the world. I had begun.

7:08 PM: Pearson would not take this offence lightly. Knowing that if it could hold me off until midnight it would claim victory, it launched every ounce of its electronic fire at me. It met my mouse strike with its deadly claws labeled “Start Homework for Chapter 9” and “Start Quiz for Chapter 9.” I trembled, but did not falter. Its body stretched off far into the distance, culminating in a tail of about twenty minutes long with the faint words “Start Quiz for Chapter 18” glistening on it. I sighed and went to work.

7:17 PM: Halfway through fighting Chapter 9 and its nonsensical attacks of graphs and me parrying with names of laws passed in the 1970’s, I began to worry. If it was taking this long at the start of my quest, how could I finish this beast before the clock struck 12? However, I pressed on.

7:26 PM: At last, I severed the paws of Pearson and claimed victory. My reward? A gleaming “Score: 100%” staring back at me. I immediately launched into the quiz, knowing that if I eased up on my attack I should surely fall.

7:39 PM: Ending the quiz, which even though they only contain at most ten questions are far harder since I can’t be sure I got them right, I emerged with an 80%. I accepted this paltry victory and moved on. Time was not on my side.

8:50 PM: Through hours of fierce battling I had slain four more chapters and their quizzes. The fighting was brutal. A headache awoke and slapped my brain with its iron fists. My eyes started to blur. My quiz scores were now in the 60’s. Not knowing what the material is even about can do strange things to a man’s answers. Pearson seemed as undaunted as ever. I switched to a new tactic: Do all the homework first, then come back to the quizzes and do them all in a row. Guesses or not, I needed an average of about 70% for quizzes in order to claim an overall average of +90% for my score.

9:43 PM: My shield had long withstood the fearsome flames of Pearson’s desperation. I could tell it was on the defensive now. My new approach was making a much more satisfying dent in its armor. I renewed my attack. Two chapters remained.

10:22 PM: Pearson shot over sixty questions at me, which I speedily sliced into ribbons. I had learned shortcuts easier ways to calculate answers, and was knocking out each chapter’s homework at a rate of twenty minutes per. Finally 18 fell, and Pearson quivered before me. It slunk around me and I ran at it, burying my sword-mouse into its scales, wherein the words “Quiz for Chapter 14” shimmered and swam. Its last defenses were falling before me.

11:10 PM: This was it. The final quiz. My eyes and head throbbed, but it mattered not. I knew that though my quiz scores had barely broken the 70 percent mark for a long while, Pearson’s end was near. I began my assault on the tail. The dragon met my thrust with a parry of six questions. As a particularly mean defense, some of them required me to draw objects on a graph. Considering that every question after chapter two I was completely guessing at the answer, I did my best. fifteen minutes later, I had done it. I held Pearson’s lifeless head in my hands. The beautiful line “My overall Score: 92.1%” stared back at me. “Homework Submitted: 19/19. Quizzes Submitted: 19/19.” (18 chapters, plus a starter quiz.) Half an hour before my deadline, I had done it. I logged off and shut the computer done with a sigh. I would sleep peacefully and long that night.

Was it really worth it? The mental agony (believe me, I can’t do its terribleness justice with the printed word), the torment of finding out we didn’t even have to do all the homework modules later? Yes, that’s right. We weren’t even going to cover all the chapters, as my teacher informed the class a few days later. Oh joy.

Well, I think it was. I couldn’t have known which ones she didn’t want us to do, and since I had waited until the final day to finish it up, I didn’t exactly have the luxury of asking. The way I see it: better safe than sorry. And on the plus side: the permanent mental scars will be salved by the fact that I don’t have any homework to do in that class, at all. Ever. because I slew it all that night, that fateful night, and buried it so deep the world would never lay eyes on it again.