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Run-of-the-mill flattery includes tape-recording the professor's lectures, pretending to shift one's major to his field, and inviting the wretch to speak at one sorority house after another. One Northwestern sociologist finds graduate students going in for the "Gemeinschaft attitude"—getting folksy through baby sitting, for example. This puts them on almost unassailable ground: "How can a teacher flunk someone his kids like?"
"A professor will write a paper for you if you just give him a chance," says a Berkeley student tip sheet. "Take in a draft or outline, and tell him you are having trouble with it; then take his criticisms and comments to heart. This will eliminate midnight panic and at least one grade's worth of errors."
Excuses & Exams. Good conning necessarily includes a range of ingenious excuses. No. 1 seems to be infectious mononucleosis, which is hard to diagnose and can be feigned to excuse weeks of goofing off. One Yaleman comes down with it at exams, which he then takes in the infirmary with his notes under the mattress. A Chicago professor notes the prevalence of "unspecified emotional disturbances," such as "the traumatic experience of a boy who, discovering his roommate was a homosexual, just wasn't able to study." Another up-to-date excuse, says the same professor, came from a lad who missed an exam and explained: "My roommate is going with a colored girl. Last night his father came to town to shoot the girl, and we were up all night barricading the door to keep him from her."
Exam time gives the con man his last chance—and perhaps the best instructions on how to seize it came from David Littlejohn, who last year was a Harvard teaching fellow, and is now an assistant professor of English at Stanford. Littlejohn set out to rebut an annual Harvard Crimson piece on how to fool the grader on exams by "use of the vague generality, the artful equivocation, and the overpowering assumption."
"Your only job is to keep me awake," wrote Littlejohn. "How? By FACTS. Any kind, but do get them in. They are what we look for, as we skim our lynx eyes over every other page—a name, a place, an allusion, an object, a brand of deodorant, the titles of six poems in a row, even an occasional date. Name at least the titles of every other book Hume ever wrote; don't say just 'medieval cathedrals'—name nine. Think of a few specific examples of 'contemporary decadence,' like Natalie Wood.
"Keep us entertained, keep us awake.
Be bold, be personal, be witty, be chock-full-of-facts. I'm sure you can do it without studying if you try. We did."