IT SEEMS LIKE there are two types of things you learn in high school: things that will help you in life, and things that will help you learn more things.

It's almost as if, for the most part, we go to school in order to prepare ourselves for more school, and we never stop to ask ourselves why. What, ultimately, is the point of school?

Uni boasts of its academic excellence, not even pretending that it's going to prepare you for a happy and successful life — the purpose of Uni is college, or, more specifically, getting students into good ones.

The past few weeks have found the Gargoyle comment threads filled with disappointment over the list of college destinations for the Class of 2009, namely over the lack of Ivy League, big-name schools. The comments have been met with endless defensive arguments, but could the anonymous commenters be right? Is Uni even living up to what it advertises?

This has caused some Gargoyle senior editors to look back on our five years here and wonder: What have we really learned at Uni?

How to prioritize

Many Uni students agree that subbie year is the most difficult year to get through — not because you have the most coursework or the most difficult classes, but because you haven't yet learned one of Uni's most important lessons: prioritizing.

Subfreshmen tend to weight all their classes equally in terms of time and effort spent on homework, not realizing that this will only result in unfinished work and extra stress.

Over time, as students get to know the teachers and the classes, they learn that there are some classes where the homework is more important than others — whether, for example, it's worth a higher percentage of the final grade or points get deducted if it's turned in late.

So when there's only a small amount of time, the homework for some classes will get done and the homework for other classes will get abandoned. In our heads, the more things don't get turned in for a class, the less of a big deal it is, and so the later the work becomes.

How to work the system

Once you've learned to prioritize your classes, you have to learn to work with the system — particularly when it comes to the classes lower on your priority list. You still have to do all the work you're assigned, but you have less time and energy to do it. So what do you do?

A large number of classes at Uni require students to read entire books, either for the purpose of writing papers, taking tests, or simple class discussion. With Uni's notorious homework load, it's difficult to keep your eyes open for 40 pages a night, or even to find time to read at all when you factor in athletics, drama, music lessons, driver's ed, jobs, etc.

Sometimes, no matter the class, reading schoolbooks falls to the very bottom of the list. That's when Uni students learn to cheat the system. There's a huge variety of Web sites that feature hundreds of book summaries, essay topics, sample essays, discussion topics, and character analyses.

As opposed to actually thoroughly reading a book, scanning these short yet sufficient summaries takes an incredibly short amount of time, which sometimes is all Uni students have to spare.

Sometimes, however, it's not even totally necessary to read the online summaries. There are many people who have written full-length, in-depth papers based only on what they could deduce from the essay prompt or the back of the book. It's a difficult task, but one that gets easier the more you do it. By making interesting, well-thought-out generalizations about the bigger picture, students can write essays giving the impression that they read the assigned material. If the paper's not going to determine your grade, then sometimes that's all that's necessary.

Sometimes, the way to cheat the system is to actually cheat, at least by the student handbook’s definition of cheating. Some students do things that would be considered cheating without even thinking about it. For instance, a lot of students work together on homework where the answers are specific, and all the same. Math homework, for example. Mostly the answers are not going to vary from person to person, so it's quite easy to get help from others who understand it better.

When it comes down to the very last bell before class, it's hard to see the harm in simply copying the last problem from someone else. If it's completed — so goes the rationale — does it matter how it was completed?

In our determination to simply get the grade, we forget what the point of homework is supposed to be: to learn. We forget that by having someone else do the work, the work loses all point. Work isn't assigned just to be done, it's assigned as practice; we learn it so it can serve as a foundation for more learning.

All that is true, but it just seems so hard to keep in mind when your brain is fried and you have only gotten three hours of sleep.

How to just "get by"

There's a question many Uni students ask themselves at one point or another: If I am never going to need to know this again, why bother learning it?

It's a legitimate question. A lot of students feel that their time and energy are being wasted on things they will never need or care to know again. If you know you're not destined for a career as a scientist or mathematician or anything involving science or math, what's the value of learning science or math? A lot of students just can't see one, and so they find no desire to do anything more in some classes than just "get by."

Depending on your personal (and your family's) feelings on grades, getting by could mean getting a B or the lowest grade on an assignment you can possibly get while still achieving an A. So you don't try your hardest; you only try as hard as you have to in order to get a mildly satisfactory grade.

This isn't exactly cheating the system, but it's reading only just as much of the book as you have to, or writing barely the minimum number of pages required. It's doing just enough, and no more than necessary, and it's how most students survive. Just this week, in the midst of finals, many of us were guilty of calculating the lowest possible grade we could get on our final to maintain our A.

How to function on the minimum

With so much on our plates as not just Uni students but as high school students, school and other parts of our lives take over so much time that some facets of functioning get neglected.

Teenagers are supposed to sleep for eight hours every night, and to many, that's eight hours that could be spent doing homework or studying or doing something else more productive.

Not only is sleep abandoned, but for a various number of reasons, including a frequent lack of cash, many students also don't eat well on a regular basis. While our PE program is fairly demanding, most students are physically fit but not exactly healthy.

The habits we form now will affect us for the rest of our lives, and if we don't know how to deal with incorporating sleep and a well-balanced diet, then our health is going to suffer as we grow older.

As of right now, though, Uni has seemingly taught us how to barely function. Being typically driven and motivated students, we have learned to forgo sleep to complete assignments and participate in extracurricular activities. We find out which classes it is is easiest to sleep in, with some students going so far as to learning to sleep with their eyes open.

How to waste time

Despite feeling perpetually rushed, many Uni students also feel that a lot of their time is wasted, both in class and out of class.

Some do it on purpose, spending hours on Facebook or watching television, and others are forced to sit through what adds up to many wasted hours as classmates and teachers go off topic or get distracted by various things.

The thing about school is we're forced to be there. We're forced to go to class, no matter what's happening in the class. We're not technically supposed to do homework during class, so it's hard not to feel kind of cheated when being in class isn't a good use of our precious time.

If we added up the hours wasted over the past five years, we could probably end up with about a semester of time we could have used to do productive things, like catch up on that homework we've had to forgo or catch up on that much-needed sleep.

How to get into college

This is probably the lesson that Uni would be proudest to know it has taught us, though, of course, judging from those comments, the Class of 2009 obviously didn't learn it very well.

First and foremost, be yourself. But this "self" may or may not be one you know very well. This is your talkative, well-read, witty, smart, humble, and unique side, a side that knows everything but doesn't flaunt it. It is a good test-taker and writes excellent essays and does more community service, whether meaningful or not, than it has time for.

Regardless of who you've been for the past five years, this is who you are when it comes to college, yet your college side must be totally different from everyone else's college side in order for you to stand out.

You must take interesting classes that will look good on your transcripts. You must get good grades in all classes, no matter what. You must be quirky, with a clear and flowing writing style. You must be very smart, but not too smart. You must not sleep in favor of exhausting yourself with activity after activity. You must play a musical instrument. You must be interested in poetry.

You must win a lot of awards. You must have a job. You must be excellent at science and math. You must be every teacher's favorite student. You must talk in class, but only when you're supposed to. You must know how to market yourself. You must know how to say all these things about yourself without making it sound like you're boasting. But, most importantly, you must be yourself.

Basically, to get into college, you have to be insane. You have to be perfect. It doesn't make any sense, and it's just too much to ask of a teenager. And as a result? You get a bunch of kids working hard at looking like they're working hard, looking like they're perfect, instead of actually trying to learn something interesting.

So?

What are we really taking away from Uni — or really, from high school, since most of these "lessons" don't just apply to Uni students?

While we have obviously learned things, it's apparent that we haven't really learned what we were supposed to. Are we really expected to remember those dates we learned three years ago in history class? Does it matter if we do?

Is the only point of high school to prepare us for college? If so, has it been successful?

What someone could take away from the things we've outlined in this editorial is that something is not quite right with Uni classes. Maybe all these things aren't necessarily bad, but they don't really bode well for success, and they don't really seem like the things a school like Uni would intend to teach us.

Mostly it comes down to what is being asked of us. Is it just too much? Or is it just too much of the wrong type of thing? Uni students are working hard — but is it all for the wrong reason?