Harvard Undergrad Discovers Grade Inflation, Nobody’s Impressed

snooze harvardTurns out all that tuition money Harvard kids shell out is for naught after all. Christian Flow, Harvard ‘10, recently wrote an article for Harvard Magazine on the university’s apparent lackadaisical attitude at giving students an actual education. Based on a personal episode of academic buffoonery involving a flight back home to write a term paper in 24 hours, Flow highlights how professors at the number four douchiest college in America do everything but put their students in the time-out zone and put a hilariously inappropriate amount of effort in squeezing quality work out of their pupils.

In three years at college, I had never been slapped around like this. This was the kind of thing that happened in high school when you didn’t do your reading. Who knew that tenured professors had the time or the temperament for this species of intervention?

Expectedly, all the blame can be dumped on the Harvard Management Company. And as the college devises ways to prevent further whiny and self-entitled protests on student-life related budget cuts, it plans to reduce the number of teaching fellows hired this year, slash small seminars in favor of giant lectures, as well as phase out general examinations for certain honors concentrations.

After the jump, it turns out Ivy League professors don’t actually give a shit how you do in their class. But various forms of B usually cut down on office hour interaction.

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Former Wharton Student Discovers Recession-Proof Industry

Things were looking up for former Wharton student and recent Columbia temp employee Chris Clemente in September 2005. For one, Clemente, 37, had just been released from prison after serving 15 years for heroin and weapons possession. But even better than his freedom–he allegedly discovered a new and promising illegal scheme! A friend tipped Clemente off to an MTA machine that was malfunctioning and giving out free fares, authorities said. Over the course of the next three years, Clemente and two others, Cary Grant (that’s his real name) and Lisa Foster Jordan, allegedly stole more than $800,000 worth of MTA money from this Penn Station machine.

In a New York Post article, an MTA spokesperson explains how this mechnaical error probably happened:

The odds of [the suspects] stumbling on this were astronomical,” MTA spokesman Jeremy Soffin said. The scenario “would only happen if you used an active debit card but had insufficient money in your account and it was from a smaller, nonlocal bank.

In other words, if you were broke and had an account at a nontraditional bank, you too could have taken advantage of the MTA.

What could have possibly brought these three down? According to this Post article, it was a “routine agency audit.” Yeah, I guess an audit conducted every three years is kind of routine.