11 Days of Class Left for Guy Who Insists He Has Plenty of Time to Fix Grades

With the school year rapidly dwindling away, Penn students everywhere are doing everything in their power to survive the overwhelming whirlwind that is finals season. While some spent their Thanksgiving holiday holed up in their childhood rooms, cramming for impending exams, and frantically calculating the lowest scores that they could get while still securing an A, one fearless sophomore is playing the long game.

When College sophomore Neil Bennett hopped on the Amtrak to head home for break on Tuesday, he was brimming with confidence. It’d been a rough semester, but the sophomore was sure that he’d be able to turn things around if he just put in the effort. While Bennett had 3 midterms and a paper due the next week and finals soon after, he felt driven to spend all of his seemingly boundless free time finally watching the recorded Econ 103 lectures that’d he’d been putting off for the last 2 months, opening his "Intro to Philosophy" textbook for the first time all semester and actually solving his Math 114 problem set on his own rather than copying the answers WolframAlpha gave him. But even the best laid plans can fail miserably, and honestly Bennett’s plan was pretty shitty to begin with.

In the blink of an eye and the pull of a handle Bennett was right back in his dorm in Harnwell, no closer to boosting his GPA than if he’d actively tried to forget what little material he’d learned over the course of the semester by banging his head against the wall for four days straight.

Nevertheless, Bennett is still confident that he can salvage his grades. “Even though I got an 11 percent on the first midterm, I heard that this math class has a really generous curve so all I need to do is get a really good grade on the final,” he told us as he watched an Econ lecture from August at 8x speed and dictated a Philosophy paper to his cellphone using speech-to-text.