For all it's worked up to be, college is little more than an elaborate gaming experience. It's something you win at in order to impress people. A college diploma is really just a lofty badge or achievement; it shows off your cred and makes people respect you. It's proof that you've worked very hard at things that don't actually matter. As someone who's beaten the college levels and now finds herself in the heat of the sequel, I thought I'd share some of the tricks that helped me get this far. Over the years I’ve transformed myself into a level 80 rogue armed to the teeth with powers of BS. I've quested my way up the leaderboards and I fought through to the finish. It took a little luck and a lot of patience, but I done made it. Here's the walkthrough to my success.

Pick a major in the humanities

No bio, no chem, no math. Nothing where your academic achievements can be measured quantitatively. Even social science cuts it close. The crux of winning at college is convincing people you know much more than you do. When it comes to science, you either know a fact or you don't. You're graded on your actual skill level within the discipline, and that is bad. Unless, of course, you have ambitions like becoming a doctor or programming the next big tech obsession. By all means go pre-med if you're into saving people from dying, but take note that you are no longer playing the game of college--you have instead begun to play its lesser-rated (but secretly better) sequel, Real Life.

Limit your reading to the first and last chapters of every assignment

Get the setup down, learn how it all ends, and you can fill in the rest from there. This works best with fiction but should be a good base formula for whatever your professors throw at you. If articles are assigned instead of books, replace chapters with pages.

Style can stand in for logic

The art of essay-writing is not unlike the art of stage magic. It's all flash and diversion, glitter and spectacle. If your argument sounds intelligent and complex, chances are your grader will believe that it is. Pepper your paragraphs with words of the day. Vary your sentence structure. Embrace the craft of building stage sets: it doesn't have to stand up like a 19th century country house, it just has to resemble the interior of one. With enough tightly constructed and impressively dense prose, you can say just about anything in a paper and people will eat it right up.

Page ranges are flexible

I consistently turned in papers that were one page under the minimum. No one ever cared. Your graders are reading through paper after tedious paper; at some point, they're going to stop counting pages. If your argument sounds convincing and you can deliver an entertaining ride, that's probably good enough for them.

Quote more than you need to

Why quote only the sentence relevant to your argument when you could quote the whole paragraph it's taken from? After all, context breeds lucidity. And if a quotation takes up more than three lines on the page, you get to section it into its own indented paragraph, with spaces before and after if you're so inclined.

14 point periods and 1.1" margins

These are cheap tricks that have been around since the dawn of the word processor, but they still work as long as you're handing in a printed paper. Just select all the periods and up the font size by two points. To the naked eye, nothing will appear different, but your text will be bumped around the lines by a few words. If all else fails with meeting a reasonable page count, this will inch you forward.

There you go--with a few Konami codes, you’re well on your way to 100% achievement completion. After all, convincing people that you deserve things is most of what makes up success in America.