Breaking the Bad News to the ’Rents

• Article by Kendall McDougal
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• May 4, 2012
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• Indiana University

With the sun shining brightly every day and full-blown darties everywhere you look, schoolwork is just about the last thing on any IU student’s mind this time of year. We can’t be wasting our time on homework when there are handles to drink, tables to dance on and Slip N’ Slides to slide down. With finals right around the corner, however, this timing is not great. It would be ideal to have those grades on the up-an-up heading into exam season. But let’s face it, that’s not going to happen. So the question is – how do you explain those shitty grades to mom and dad? If you don’t feel like fessing up and admitting that they’re paying tuition for you to drink like a fish and ditch class, here are some other cop-outs you can try.

My professor was out to get me : Depending on how gullible your folks are, this simple excuse just might do the trick. Blame anything and everything on your damn professor (or professors, depending on how much you killed that GPA). Explain how for some reason he/she didn’t like you from the start. No matter how many office hours you went to you just could not win that prof over. Make sure you get all worked up and angry about it so your parents can’t help but to take your word for it.  

The final was unfair and “everyone bombed it”: Tell mom and dad how many hours you slaved over your final exam. Whip out your fake 20-page study guide and mile-high stack of note cards that you made up just for this excuse. Then go into how unfair the teacher was and how nothing on the exam was even remotely close to what you learned. It should go something like, “Everyone in my class was so upset because we all put hours and hours into studying and still all failed. It was so unfair, I worked so hard and it didn’t even pay off…blah, blah, blah.” You get the idea. Hopefully you’ll get your parents’ much-desired sympathy. 

I was emotionally stressed and couldn’t focus: Pull the sympathy card. Even though they might be disappointed by your grades, your parents want your health to come first. Say you had a really rough semester emotionally and good grades just weren’t in the cards for you this spring. Come up with whatever you can – you got dumped, your best friend stabbed you in the back, you got cheated on, whatever. Devise some sort of sob story and hopefully they’ll feel so concerned that they will completely forget about your grades.

My course load was too heavy: Make it look like you set out to be an overachiever this semester. Explain how you signed up for all of your hardest required classes and stacked up your credit hours because you wanted to work ahead. You did the best you could, but in the end it was just too much on your plate and you couldn’t have tried any harder. Hopefully your parents will be proud of your “intentions” to go above and beyond at start of semester. 

When all else fails, just start crying: If none of the above excuses are working for you and all hope seems lost, bawl your eyes out and beg for forgiveness. You’re clearly a terrible liar and are incapable of making any of your stories sound believable. Like it or not, this is what you’re stuck with. Get the waterworks goin’ and hope for the best, champ. 

Now that you’ve got the ideas, it is up to you, my fellow Hoosiers,to carry them out flawlessly. Pick the one that you think would work best on mom and pops and go for the gold. What do you have to lose? In the meantime, get out there and have fun in these last weeks of the year and deal with the damage later. In a few years your parents will look back and laugh at all of this… hopefully.