Word: conning
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...faced with 700 yawning faces, the big-campus lecturer yearns for one passionate learner-and this is what the good con man impersonates. "The very first lecture, the one everybody cuts, is the most important in the course," says a Wisconsin senior. Moving in fast, the con man lovingly establishes his own name with the prof. After that, says a Princeton honors student, one need only "sit in the first two rows of the lecture room and maintain continuous eye contact with the lecturer. Make him glad he's looking at you. Give him that receptive gaze, which implies...
Prof. Voltaire. At the University of Michigan, fraternity houses are stocked with not only old exams but also "teacher psych-outs"-dossiers compiled by A-students on professors' likes and dislikes. This allows con men to lug around the profs favorite magazine, or to ape his lingo. If this fails, says a recent Michigan graduate, there is the "welfare approach" of pretending poverty by wearing "hand-pressed khaki pants" and asking the professor on the very first-day "Ah, how much did you say that textbook was?" As a Wisconsin con man puts it: "These days...
...Con men rely heavily on "respectful disagreement"-tantalizing the professor who pines for ardent student protest. Really daring grade grubbers go much farther. "If his poli-sci prof is an outspoken liberal," says one Yaleman, "the imaginative con man adopts a fascist interpretation in his classwork. Since most profs like to compare themselves to Voltaire, they will give the Jittie fascist every benefit of the doubt...
Exam time gives the con man his last chance-and perhaps the best instructions on how to seize it came from David Littlejohn, who last year was a Harvard teaching fellow, and is now an assistant professor of English at Stanford. Littlejohn set out to rebut an annual Harvard Crimson piece on how to fool the grader on exams by "use of the vague generality, the artful equivocation, and the overpowering assumption...
...brash, breezy con man of a rainmaker (Robert Morton) appears on the scene. The clouds are recalcitrant, but the rainmaker opens the heavens for Lizzie and the gentle symbolic rain of romance quickens...