| Everybody who has experienced the wonderful (ahem) American educational system has probably noticed this curious phenomenon at one time or another. Either you work pretty hard on an assignment and then get an average grade, or you utterly blow it off and receive a killer one. Not only can this be quite frustrating, but it also serves as an excellent reminder of how arbitrary and virtually meaningless your precious grades really are.
The first assignment in in my senior year high school Composition class was a two page paper that was supposed to be about holidays. I hastily typed one page of poorly thought out sarcasm (dealing with the relative merits of Arbor Day and Columbus Day) during the class immediately preceding Composition. A+ baby, I kid you not. Towards the end of the year the teacher told me it was the best thing I'd written the whole year. Now, the paper that actually deserved that praise for was a fifteen page introduction to the history, present, and future of cryptography, like my own HO-scale version of Cryptonomicon. It got a nice shiny B-.
It's pretty tempting to try and use this effect as an advantage, by putting the least possible effort into everything, and -- if the rule holds -- getting a 4.0. My friends agree that everybody should do this, but so far none of us have had the guts to try :-) | 
