Vol 2, Issue 7: the issue in which readme tries to calculate the lowest possible finals grade they need to pass
Rejected Headlines
- Rope and stool salesmen loitering outside particularly difficult finals
- Due to overenrollment, CMU to add 4 AM exam slots
- Person who said "Wow, that was easy" after exam stoned to death
- Entropy sold out on caffeneited drinks, caffeine tablets, coffeeflavored chocolate, and methamphetamine
- CMU students sign up for isolation experiments to find quiet study spots
- CIT student's "new kicks" deemed "too swag" by the administration
- In shocking news, 112 grading party turns into a freeforall as TAs fight for last slices of cold pizza
- Biology department recommends students engineer another pandemic for finals reprieve, extra credit offered
- Homeless Ph.D. student holds fence for record 5 years, fails quals
- Can President Joe Biden please presidentially pardon my AIV?
- Prosecutor agrees to downgrade Capital Grains to 1st Degree Grains
- 3D Printer Crushed by Anvil, Now Regular Printer
- Dedicated Gender Studies student finds clitoris, loses track of penis
All this and more, not in this issue!
Student gives 75 classmates AIVs
On Tuesday, November 26th, during a midterm for 18-122 (Principles of Slightly Different Computing), a record of 75 students were given academic integrity violations within a 32 minute span. While their alleged offenses varied widely in scale and execution, they all constituted some form of unauthorized aid, traced back to a single student who passed the course with a C last semester. Most significantly, none of the students involved showed any desire to receive assistance on the midterm.
The aid arrived in many different forms. Some thirty students received copies of Tuesday's midterm in their CMU Gmail inbox the night before, with personalized notes. Others were given assistance during the test itself: the student providing aid was caught no less than 13 times staring directly at a terrified student in the lecture hall, aggressively blinking in morse code. Several more students entered the test with detailed course notes written on their hands or arms, which they consistently denied writing themselves. "I just woke up with this written on me," one concerned AIV recipient stated.
With over 90% of the class having received unauthorized and undesired assistance, just 9 students remain. They report a frightening atmosphere both in and out of the class, due to an ever-present threat of unwanted help with their coursework. One student reported changing her route to her apartment, after a masked figure jumped out of the shadows and began reciting homework answers. Another classmate returned to Michigan over the break to find his bedroom window shattered, the culprit being a brick with a note tied to it containing a printed copy of the upcoming final.
The yearly CMU black market finals guide
Welcome, dear one, to the last academic guide you will ever need.
In this trying season of finals and term projects – when time is short, energy wanes, and we remain besieged by our thanksgiving-fueled, Celsius-charged gut microbiomes – conventional academics are no longer viable. This compendium, brought to you after immense struggle and a dash of bloodshed with campus security, is your ticket through. Be warned all you heart-faint, law-abiding, and poorly-hydrated souls: these strategies are exhausting and cruel. But master them, and you will emerge from your exam rooms a conqueror.
Steal, steal, steal. The treasure map to exams lies right under your nose: in lectures. Don’t restrict your exposure to material to a wan few hours a week. Whether you can sneak in a powerful laptop equipped with the most egregious of LaTex instances or a timeless relic of paper and pencil, extract every drop these sessions offer. Siphoning material busies the hands, engages the mind, and fills your vault of insights until the entire course is your accomplice in success.
Even at this thirteenth hour, with lectures dwindling and exams encroaching, steal like your life depends upon it. Butter up your friends with a careful bribe – a kindly worded text – and their guard may slip, leaving their own carefully compiled information to your mercy. Slink into professors’ hours with sweet nothings of mostly informed questions, and they might unwittingly arm you with the cinching answers. Steal from online guides, antiquated Quizlets, Greek siblings if you can and Pitt comrades if you must. Piracy isn’t just a crime, but a divine path: for the proactive, the courageous, and the financially successful, it is the path to victory.
Keep friends close, and flakers closer. University is not a garden party; it is a court of knives. We each must decide ourselves when to sheathe, when to brandish, and when to press steel (metaphorically, of course) to the throat of our peers. By now, group project pre-selection has passed, and ideally, you’ve secured honorable compatriots amongst the untrustworthy and the feckless. Yet for those less fortunate, shackled non-communicators, deadline-huggers, and other such chips on the wheel of progress, be unrelenting in your vigilance.
Hound your partners with ceaseless check-ins, draw them in with saccharine invitation to group work sessions. Feed them exciting updates and reassurances of grandeur. Many a “bad partner” need only guidance, structure, or an unmistakable – yet comforting – eye over the shoulder. Draw them in and hold them close, too tightly to escape your watch.
But when diplomacy falters – when your flaker retreats to the shadows of silence and hostility – you must prepare for war.
Keep meticulous archives: document every ignored plea, every shattered deadline, every contribution or blinding lack thereof. Step boldly into their positions and cover their work: let effort sing of your sacrifice. Find absolution in your reliable teammates, or the overarching authority of your professors. With this, your adversary will find themselves entangled in a web of gutted alibis and dead promises, excised from the project that would have saved their grade.
Come presentation day, stand tall. Watch your honest partners gleam and your adversary crumble to dust. This university is yours to conquer.
Hone your self to a bleeding edge. This is the most critical of all. An empty vessel cannot pour, an empty basket cannot feed, and you can expend no healthy effort – to say nothing of besting finals – without being armed, stocked, and cared for.
Rest long and well. Sleep is not a luxury, but a whetstone; it relaxes the muscles, sharpens the mind, ensures you another fight and another victory. Sleep unabashedly and callously; obliterate any obstacles between you and your blankets. Let rest be the foundation of your strength.
Eat richly and with intent. Beyond mere sustenance, let food be a source of comfort and joy. Habitualists, savor familiar routines and the now-scarce relaxation they afford you. Experimentalists, let new tastes be a welcome reprieve from academic drudgery. Steal what pleasure you can, especially from these rituals of sustenance.
Collude with friends. Breathe deep the cold air. Brutally arrange your schedule, and carve out inviolable pockets for your personal pursuits. Guard your pleasures, the spoils of your struggle.
With that, dear one, your training is complete. There is a world beyond the final, and with this, you will soar to it.
CivE department apologizes for increase in campus construction
Earlier this week the department of Civil and Environmental Engineering issued a statement addressing the sudden increase in construction around CMU’s campus, making many spaces unusable, and causing significant traffic delays as 5th Ave and Forbes Ave have had sections of the roads closed. In the statement, the head of undergraduate and graduate studies for the department cite the practicum portion of this year’s finals as being primarily responsible for the inconveniences, citing that “The inconveniences are deeply regrettable especially that they have come at a time of heightened scrutiny due to a cost and time overrun in the renovation of Wean Hall proposed during last year's senior capstone. We apologize for the effect the current delays are having on the current student body and we are doing everything we can to expedite the projects, including efforts to integrate AI into the project management systems and outsourcing additional labor from illegal immigrants being bused in from El Paso.”
Students affected by the delays report the biggest issues at hand remain the recurring delays of the 61 and 71 bus routes that have been affected by lane closures, fearing delays of up to 10 minutes, 24 seconds and 35 milliseconds and causing large queues and congestion at bus stops. It is a well known struggle that many students are unable to walk between campus and off campus housings due to high concentrations of plants belonging to the family Poaceae, Cyperaceae, and Juncaceae, often colloquially referred to as “grass”. Additionally, many students left stranded at these overcrowded bus stations share concerns that they may be vulnerable to women by traveling in smaller groups, though it has been over 50 years since the last reported incident of a woman being spotted near campus. Hamerschlag House continues to undergo renovations to install the planned seating area and overhang. Students, when asked about their thoughts, responded overwhelmingly with “Isn’t that the ECE building?” The shortage of housing for students continues to plague the upperclassmen with increasing rent and competition for on campus housing, leading many students to rent out unused beds when pulling all-nighters, or even challenge people to gladiatorial combat for the room in common room spaces.
While the CEE finals are expected to continue for another two weeks, undergraduate students that have already completed their finals are being redirected to aid the graduate student projects in an attempt to shift the completion dates forward for fall 2024 and proactively begin plans for the spring 2025 finals. The CEE has stated its commitment to enable Carnegie Mellon University to return its normalcy and shed its nickname Constant Maintenance Underway.
So you're on a couple waitlists
This past week CMU students were given the opportunity to register for spring semester classes. Due to over-enrollment this year some poor sops (me) were given 9:30 pm registration times. By noon, 15-122 already had a 370-person waitlist, which is fine, it’s only a pre-req to every single course I need. Despair set in as students with unfortunate registration times (me) panicked about getting graduation requirements. However, there need not be panic. There are many benefits to being on the waitlist, but it's fine as it is.
First, if you’re stressing about taking concepts and 15-122 in the same semester, or planning on registering for whatever weedout course your major requires, don’t worry, you won’t have to do these hard courses because you can’t get in. You can spend this new found free time making fun of your friends that have to take hard courses (absolute suckers). You don’t even have to take easy core courses at 8:00 am because the people with 3:00 pm registration times took them. If you were planning on doing a double major, that burden is lifted off of your shoulders because no way are you ever getting off of the waitlist for any of the courses you need for that second major.
Second, as finals week rapidly approaches, there is no solace in the fact that we have to do this all again in the spring. However, there’s nothing to worry about! Only being registered for one course means just the one final. I get to spend the last half of finals week laughing at you nerds. Bonus: if you just drop out you never have to take finals again, and then other people (me) can get off of waitlists. Third, you can finally achieve a healthy sleep schedule. CMU students are known to spend 80-plus hours a week doing schoolwork. If you couldn’t get the courses you need next semester, fear not, you will have plenty of time to fix your ruined sleep schedule. You can finally go to sleep before 3:00 am. No more late night trips to Scotties to buy a caseload of Celisus for your third all-nighter in a row. You can sleep soundly with the anxiety of getting employed at [insert quant firm here] without taking 15-210. Fourth, you can finally call your mom, with no courses to occupy your schedule you definitely have time to call her. I know you're addicted to your phone, so use it to call her. Why are you still reading this? Go call your mother, she misses you. It’s not like you're going to get off the waitlist in the 30 minutes you spend talking to her.
Dying CMU students will now take "Finals"
On Friday, Warner Hall announced a policy of "Finals" (with a capital "F"), much to the confusion of the student body. While the specifics of the plan have yet to be shared, administration has made concepts of it clear: all CMU students who die during the fall and spring semesters will be subject to "Finals" recapping the sum of their human experience.
The content of the Finals was initially unclear, but Gina Casalegno, Vice President of Student Life and Student Death, was quick to provide a syllabus for a 0-unit course, "Mortality" (with codes including 00-100 for first-years and 00-800 for graduate students), which all CMU students will be enrolled in. Specific questions likely to be asked include "Are you proud of who you became?" and "Did fear and regret shape your perception of what you could accomplish?"
Catching students in their final moments to take a lengthy exam may prove difficult, however. This morning, large nets were unfurled beneath bridges near campus to roll students into a testing facility, which will return them to their original trajectory once grades are posted. Cars on campus have been limited to 5 miles per hour, and large "man catcher" buckets have been installed on their grilles to catch students who otherwise would have been killed, such that they may turn in their Final before being battered to death in a controlled environment similar to Forbes Avenue.
CMU's goals are unclear, but our investigative journalists were able to conclude through cat burglary that an institutional objective for the 2025 calendar year is to "instill an awareness of mortality and the finality of death into our students, staff, and faculty."
Some finals traditions!
Pittsburgh itself is an incredibly unique city – near Ohio, but not Midwest, near Maryland but not Southern, near West Virginia, but most residents do not consider it Appalachian. We also have our own “accent insulate” here, as a consequence of Pittsburgh being settled during the time of the 13 colonies and the mountainous geography of the region. While the North and South have largely moved into the same “accent group”, Southwestern Pennsylvania prides itself on being different. The way of speech here combines morphosyntactic structures from Scotch-Irish (My car needs warshed, as opposed to my car needs washing), and has over a century of contact from Eastern and Southern European languages (The monophthongization of the MOUTH vowel, for example). The Allegheny mountains have isolated us, which only makes us more unique.
Linguistics is not the only aspect of our city in which we are unique – our schools have some of the wackiest traditions in collegiate America, and since finals week is approaching, the better. The Dartmouth on the Monongahela, Carnegie Mellon University, offers a myriad of century-old traditions pertaining to the hellish finals week. The most prominent tradition here is known as Tartan Roulette. While this may seem like monetary gambling, which you can do at the poker club, it is a challenge to see if the student would even be able to see their final exams. In this 100+ year old tradition, a student goes to one of our on-campus dining locations just before a final, and asks the cashier to do Tartan Roulette. To the student two soups are presented – one is just regular chicken noodle soup (you can ask for a vegan option as well!), and the other is Perpetual 1-Day Blinding Stew. If the student chooses correctly, they will be taking their exam with a huge adrenaline rush, allowing them to perform significantly better. If you chose wrong, well then you’re fucked.
SASC or SEX? New Coaching Workshop Draws Controversy
The Student Academic Success Center's new seminal seminar is under fire after students label it as "gross." The new seminar, designed specifically for finals week, outlines how students can best dress themselves to improve grade performance. "Dress for success!" said Dr. Lacey Skivvies, head of this new initiative. Dr. Skivvies hopes this new program will boost grades by as much as 69%, and contribute to "a more revealing understanding of academic success."
The workshop includes hands on demonstrations for how best to flirt with much older professors, as well as some wardrobe pieces provided free of charge from randomly selected School of Art students. At the end of the workshop, pamphlets were handed out that included instructions on the best arousal strategies for 122 TAs, with some of the top strategies being: avoiding segfaults in your code, mentioning how good Rust's ownership system is at every available opportunity, and wearing anything that exposes more than an inch of skin.
Opponents to this workshop argue that the curriculum centers too heavily around the male gaze, with one student saying "wearing tight cropped shirts works for some professors, but we need a greater representation of what female professors find attractive." Some have taken to solving this issue by wearing clothing that bears the face of a more attractive person, although SASC has not endorsed that technique.
One student who has taken the workshop and implemented the strategies called it "really helpful" and "the only things keeping my QPA up."
Scotty Dog to Race at 2025 Carnival
The Carnegie Association of Networking and Involvement in Necessary Expenditures is proud to announce that their 2025 buggy driver will be none other than our beloved mascot, Scotty the Scotty dog. Readme spoke with a member of the Carnegie Association of Networking and Involvement in Necessary Expenditures, who chose to remain anonymous for official Association purposes (and not because this reporter forgot to take their name). The spokesman was quick to clarify, “This endeavour is completely legal. There is no rule prohibiting a Scotty dog from driving a buggy.” In response to criticism that a dog driving a buggy was too far fetched, the Association stated, “We were told it was impawsible for a dog to win buggy, but the Carnegie Association of Networking and Involvement in Necessary Expenditures doesn’t back down when it gets ruff.” In unrelated news, the Carnegie Association of Networking and Involvement in Necessary Expenditures has submitted a formal request for peanut butter and bacon treats at Carnival. CMU often has a shortage of small Asian women around Carnival time, so to the Carnegie Association of Networking and Involvement in Necessary Expenditures, it seemed natural to try something new. Readme attempted to look into past entries of other animals in buggy competitions, but was quickly informed we were barking up the wrong tree. Many Readme readers may be curious about the design of the buggy. Unconfirmed reports suggest the buggy may be painted in the style of Pittsburgh’s own Andy Warhowl. No matter the outcome of the race, rest assured that Scotty will go down in buggy history as a “good boy.” Spectators are welcome to come cheer him on in the cutest race in CMU history.
Ethics final causes moderate ruckus
Over the past few weeks, local shooting ranges have been seeing an increase in CMU student patronage. According to onsite readme reporters, a number of students are taking time out of their weekends to practice at the pistol range.
Many members of reAdme speculate that this may be related to the new philosophy course, 80420: Introduction to Practical Ethics. As opposed to a standard sitdown exam, 80420 utilizes a practical final exam in order to determine a students’ final grade. According to an anonymous whistleblower in the class, the contents of the final have all test takers situated in a lecture hall facing each other. Each student will then be supplied a pistol with a single bullet loaded and the safety off. When the exam starts, test takers are forced to choose one of two choices: to shoot, or not to shoot. Should participants choose to shoot another student, the student responsible for the shooting will earn an A for the semester. However, should a student abstain from shooting, they will earn a D. Shootees will be given 10% off of their next purchase at the Carnegie Mellon University Bookstore, and families of those who have passed will be gifted a free Carnegie Mellon University branded casket.
Polls taken by readMe’s field officers outside shooting ranges indicate a large majority of student patrons are indeed registered for 80420. However, readers should note that correlation does not equal causation. It is also possible that students are preparing themselves to defend against burglary. Astute readers will recall the attempted burglary on Walnut Street just a couple weeks prior, where the assailant was armed with a knife and Zelle™©. ReadmE encourages all readers to stay safe and vigilant on the lawless streets of Forbes and Fifth Ave.