Quitters Sometimes Win

It's the beginning of the semester, and hope springs eternal. The class looks OK, you guess, and you should be able to get a good grade. But for some of you, and it may be you, somewhere along the line things go awry. Maybe it's not your fault, but of course it is, but no need to face that demon now. The immediate need when confronted with the possibility of failure is what to do about it.

You may treat it like the funny noise in your car: turn up the sound system so you don't hear the funny noise anymore, i.e., ignore it and hope/assume it will go away. A lot of students do that and show up at the instructor's doorstep at the 11th hour inquiring what they can do to pull out of the skid. The professor is likely to spend half an hour with you going through the typical checklist of things that will lead to improved performance, spouting reassuring platitudes along the way, and a minority may actually get back on the highway. But for the majority, it will be crash and burn.

There is a fascinating subset of those that fail that seem completely oblivious to the fact that they are failing. They simply never hear the noise in the car, and seem to assume that everything will turn out fine (the instructor is too nice to flunk me, nobody gets an F, I'll come through at the end, etc., I don't know what they're thinking.) The most mystifying of these magical thinkers are the ones that disappear for most of the semester and reappear at the very end. Now you might think that they would approach the instructor with their particular sad story, and we've heard a wide variety of these, some of which have validity, to somehow make-up or account for the lost work/grades. But these Polyannas just show up at the end of the semester, having missed most of the tests and assignments, and blithely complete the final tests/assignments, with no real chance of passing the course. Part of me admires the stalwart and stoic march to certain doom. Mostly I just scratch my head in wonder.

However, for most that fail, there comes a time when you hear the noise in the car and realize that something is wrong. While the obvious advice is to see the instructor or take other remedial actions as soon as possible, I'd like to offer another perspective. Everything is trade-offs, costs/benefits, expected values, etc., it seems. In this context it means that you should ask yourself what is the cost of doing what it takes to give yourself a chance to get through the class successfully (however you define that), what is the probability that those efforts will be successful, and what are the costs/benefits to be gained by doing other things. In simple terms, sometimes it's better to quit something that probably won't work out to do better on something that will. And here's the payoff to all of this: don't quit at the end, quit at the beginning. We don't like giving out bad grades, but it's really a shame when someone has put a lot of time into it. After all, you could have stayed home and done nothing to get an "F." So my point is, when you hear the noise, fix it immediately or sell the car right away.