QUIZ: Is your essay too short, or are post-secondary treatises a futile and meaningless exercise in quantifying intellectual abilities in a way that presents a moral and physical hardship to their creator?

Hey students! It’s midterm season and you know what that means: essays are due! Love ‘em or hate ‘em, you’re bound to encounter at least one— and you’d better be prepared for the inevitable moment when you realize your essay isn’t long enough. Time to panic? Or time to embrace the fundamental knowledge that judging a person by their facile, post-secondary compositions truly degrades their intellectual and physical capabilities? Take this quiz to learn the truth!

1. Let’s start simple. How long does your essay have to be?

A measly ten pages. I could do it in my sleep.

A whole ten pages, but I only know enough to fill five. Do you think that will be okay?

Numbers are but a human inventions. To that end, the mere suggestion that the length of an essay could possibly have any correlation to the depth and breadth of knowledge contained within a scholar’s mind is limiting, and, frankly, insulting.

2. And how long do you have to write it?

A month. A month! What do they take me for, an illiterate kindergartener?

Only a month! How am I supposed to write so much in such a short time frame?

It is lamentable that we are expected to expend incalculable precious physical energy counting the passing seconds as they inevitably drain away, leaving us mere desolate shells of our former studious selves, all to create a piece of intellectual drivel within an arbitrary schedule! Furthermore: time! What even is time?

3. Surely you learned enough in class to cobble something together.

I’ve been sleeping at the library since this was assigned. I probably know more than Professor Rogers, by now, and I just emailed her saying as much.

Ah yes, “class.” The class I definitely went to all the time instead of sleeping off my hangovers. Loved it. What building is it in again?

Only the intellectually bankrupt could conceive of any “class” as being the primary institution upon which to succinctly derive their scholarly earnings; to that end, any professor (for example: Ms. Elizabeth Rogers, MD, PhD) who claim that attendance is crucial, is merely participating in the ritual of self-aggrandizement.

4. Have you tried adding more primary sources to flesh out your essay?

That’s all I use. Where do you think I get my information from, Wikipedia? Please.

I’ve already used all the longest quotes I could find, and so I made some up, but I still haven’t hit the word count!

To use the historical communications of others, instead of one’s own cerebral prowess, is nothing more than an experiment in blatant and hypocritical plagiarism, which time and time again proves nothing but an author’s mere unwillingness to use his or her own mental faculties.

5. It’s the night before the essay is due! That was fast! How’s that conclusion coming along?

This essay structure is a work of art, the likes of which this institution has never seen.

Oh god, I forgot I needed one! Bring on the caffeine! Maybe I can ask for an extension?

It can be argued that a true conclusion can never be achieved. It can also be argued that the very suggestion that one’s quest for the definitive truth can never lead to a satisfactory ending, thereby suggesting a lack of understanding of the process of time; which, it has already been argued, is merely a concept. Thusly, beginning the essay in the first place is rendered moot.

6. It’s Turn-It-In time! How’d you do?

I turned it in over a week ago, and it was ten pages over the required amount.

I got to seven and a half by upping the font size and adding drawings!

Firstly, the mental hardship that the mere author of this paper has sustained upon attempting to limit themselves to the rigorous confines of the “establishment” proved insurmountable. Secondly, the act of assignation of such a project can clearly be defined as alienating to those who dare to challenge the status quo. And thirdly, to that end, the author shall be requiring an extension.

Check Results

QUIZ: Is your essay too short, or are post-secondary treatises a futile and meaningless exercise in quantifying intellectual abilities in a way that presents a moral and physical hardship to their creator?

You are the classmate everyone hates.

But congratulations: your essay was long enough, perfect, and made everyone else’s look bad. Hope you’re happy. Grade: A

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QUIZ: Is your essay too short, or are post-secondary treatises a futile and meaningless exercise in quantifying intellectual abilities in a way that presents a moral and physical hardship to their creator?

Your essay is definitely too short.

Hopefully those drawings were funny enough to distract your teacher from the fact that you clearly shrunk the margins in what you thought was a clever ruse! Grade: B

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QUIZ: Is your essay too short, or are post-secondary treatises a futile and meaningless exercise in quantifying intellectual abilities in a way that presents a moral and physical hardship to their creator?

As if you would debase yourself by handing in the essay at all!

This exercise in futility has proven that the very foundations of academia could truly benefit from your intellectual discourse. What’s more, it is altogether clear that your professor will understand the hardships to which you have been subjected, and alter her syllabus to avoid forcing such banal exercises on you in future. Grade: What, precisely, even are grades, exactly?

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