I seem to remember many millions of years ago
when I was in fifth year at high school, we had a glorified book report which made up a large part of our final exam result. My time addled old brain seems to think it was called an R.P.R. but I may be wrong.

I remember everyone being really serious about how important this thing was. All my classmates were milling around the library trying to find the most hoity-toity piece of literature they could lay their hands on. Not for me, all this effort! After scanning through a few of my friend's mum's readers digest condensed books without any joy, I again returned to the library and decided on the literary work which I would compose my masterpiece on.

"In Honour Bound" by Gerald Seymour. Basically an Andy McNab style thriller about some army type fellow smuggling stinger missiles into Afghanistan during the Russia-Afghan war. Leafing through this hefty tome, it became quickly apparent that I was going to have to work hard to adequately answer the whole range of questions which I had been set, such as studying character relationships, seeing how plot devices were used to move the story along etc..... it was basically an Arnie film in book form. Character relationships? Well.... they shot at each other a lot. The final result was less an R.P.R. and more R.P.G.

Somehow I managed to get a B overall, and this was back when exams were actual exams, not precisely rehearsed regurgitation classes. (/old person blog). This is made even more amazing due to the fact I never actually finished the book..... even then my brain was starting to figure out the shortest way to achieve things. They didn't care about the plot of the book and the examiner was unlikely to have read it, I reasoned, so I scanned it and made a load of stuff up.

I still have the book too, I never returned it to the library. Should be around sixteen years of late charges by now.

Take heed, children! It's not how hard you try, it's how craftily you can disguise your laziness.
( baw__bag contains traces of nuts on, Tue 18 Aug 2009, 17:49, 2 replies)

"not precisely rehearsed regurgitation classes"
I'm currently doing an English Lit degree, part of our exams involve being given the exam question 2 months in advance, writing the essay, memorising it and then regurgitating it in the exam. I do wonder sometimes why I'm wasting so much money on a degree.
(Madam Cholet, Tue 18 Aug 2009, 19:02, closed)

I had something similar in Standard Grade English
I had to write an essay on Don DeLillo's Libra, a book about Lee Harvey Oswald being recruited by the CIA to assassinate Kennedy.
I got one chspter in and decided I couldn't be arsed and would get round to it later (it was the summer holidays, I had plenty of time).

Well, come time to write the afore-mentioned essay, I was still a mere one chapter into the book and still couldn't be arsed reading it.
So I read the synopsis online and blagged it. Got a 2 (B) as well, was well chuffed.
(Pope Jamiroquai III, Wed 19 Aug 2009, 0:34, closed)