• Come to class late, leave early, or just not come at all
• Spend class time using your phone for social media, texting, podcast viewing, shopping, or posting on social media a link responding to a text of a shopping podcast
  
• Never discuss the material with your classmates
• Never read lecture supplements sent via email or posted with class updates
  
• Do not study the reading assignments before the class meeting covering that material
• Only do the assigned readings on the day before a possible test or exam instead of before the day it is to be covered in class
• If a topic is to be covered during multiple classes, never reread the assignment before the second day
• Focus narrowly on what you think you need to remember to pass a test, rather than developing a deep understanding of the subject
• Memorize lists & terms instead of understanding their use, applications and meaning
• Don't review available study questions before each class
• Do the required work and nothing more; never look at optional or recommended readings
• Never contact the instructor except to ask about your exam scores or to what parts of the material are most important to study
• Don't take any notes from lectures, guest speakers' presentations, videos or other students' comments during discussion
• Restrict class notes to copying slides from the screen
• Be too shy to try to answer a discussion question asked during class or be too embarrassed to ask questions you fear are too dopey
• Caveat of the obvious: Questions would be better left unasked if you came to class unprepared and don't know a clear answer found in the homework, or if you are asking for a repeat of information you missed because you were not paying attention while texting your friends or doing the homework for a different class.

• Memorize and regurgitate parrot-fashion instead of understanding and applying the material
• Repeat lists or terms from the textbook instead of answering the questions
• Blindly transcribe textbook details even if lectures or other readings questioned their validity
• Write an answer for the question you wanted to get instead of the one that is actually asked
• Rewrite the question itself as an illusion of actually providing an answer

- A tale of "Test Time in Verse" cause every student's been there

Also see Rotfeld's essays on higher education, especially:
   - Slacker Profs Make for Slacker Students, The Irascible Professor (July 28, 2008)
   - Hello, Bird, I'm Learning Ornithology, Marketing Educator, 17 (Fall 1998): 4, 6
   - Chris: A Professor's Memory, Marketing Educator, 13 (Fall 1994): 4
   - Are These Lists Really Necessary? Marketing Educator, 17 (Winter 1998): 6
   - Marketing Wisdom of Dagwood, Hagar or Charlie Brown, AMS Quarterly, 2 (December 1998): 5
   - Evaluating the Point of Grades, AMS Quarterly, 4 (June 2000): 7

Professor Emeritus Herbert Jack Rotfeld
Special Advisor to the Graduate School
Hargis Hall
Auburn University
Auburn, Alabama  36849
         rotfehj@auburn.edu
       

Copyright 1990-2026 Herbert Jack Rotfeld