Academic integrity is a serious issue here at Vassar College. The institution of which we are lucky enough to be a part prides itself on the ability of its students to be honest and engaged enough with their studies to not only put forth their own ideas, but also to cultivate opportunities that nurture those thoughts and delve deeply into their own subjectivity. Students must submit all original work and accept and connect with professors to correct their shortcomings and failures. But finals are stressful, and desperate times call for desperate measures.
If you’re like me, you’ve spent this whole semester teaching dance and writing for the Misc, so you haven’t had time to pay attention in class or do any of the readings. That’s why, this week I’ve worked hard to obtain every single answer to every final for every class to share with all of you. If I can alleviate just a fraction of your panic, I’d like to do that. That’s why I started writing for the humor section in the first place (well, not really; I wrote humor for my high school’s paper, too. But it’s a nice idea). Think of it as a Solstice gift, and please use all of the academic integrity you possess to copy down the following answers to your finals onto the inside of a water bottle label for convenient and sneaky reading during your exams. We’ll begin with the Macroeconomics final:
Answer number one: ECON-200-01
1) What are the limitations of a nation’s resources?
Answer: Why are you taking econ in the first place? Are you feeling fulfilled by this course? Is this what you really love doing? If it is, that’s awesome, and you probably don’t even need me to tell you that the limits of a nation’s resources are land, labor, capital and entrepreneurship, because look at you! You love econ, you smart little cookie, and you’re taking an econ course so that’s awesome! I just want to check in with the rest of these people. If you’re taking this to satisfy your QA requirement, maybe you should’ve considered ECON 102 instead because this is a 200-level course, and I’m concerned you’re overworked studying something you feel ambivalent about. Are you taking this because you think econ will help you get a job after college? Look, just having a Bachelor’s will help you get a job after college. It doesn’t matter so much what you study, as long as what you study is something you love and are passionate about. It’s admirable that you care about your future, but your future starts with you caring for yourself right now. And I know some parents pressure you to go into finance, or you feel uncomfortable when grandfather says things like, “If you aren’t learning about biology and chemistry, what are you learning?” and your answer is that you’re learning that the films of Yasujiro Ozu are often misread as “mystical” and prototypically “Eastern” by Western film theorists, when really there’s some very comprehensible and clever inversion of cause and effect but that feels like an unsatisfactory answer to that question because your grandfather is a crazy smart and accomplished doctor and you’re a film major, and that’s valued less than cardiology, but guess what you love film and Yasujiro Ozu’s movies are super interesting and insightful without sacrificing brevity. So study what you love. Everything is going to be ok. No matter what grad school you get into or rejected from, no matter how one of your finals goes, you always have a choice. Always. So try to choose something you enjoy, and if that is econ that’s wonderful, and if it isn’t, that’s just as wonderful.
2) This answer satisfies all questions on every single final exam in the whole college.
