Confi Guide Special: Essential Study Guide Rules

Before you know it, Camp Harvard will be a distant memory and exam time will be upon us. For the unseasoned student, this means going through your syllabi, figuring out which books you need to read, and releasing them from the plastic wrap that has been covering them since September.

For the efficient (read: lazy and smart) student, it means that it’s time to email those people you kind of know from section and start a “study group.” Don’t expect to actually study together, however, for study groups exist for a sole purpose: to create study guides. Each member of your group will do about 50 pages of reading and summarize it in a page. The group organizer will then combine the summaries into a satisfyingly thick consolidation of all the knowledge you should have learned during the semester.

Like all group interactions, the study guide fandango requires careful choreography, so read on for our rules of study guide etiquette.

1. Leadership. If you are the study group organizer, you still should do some work. It is, however, perfectly acceptable to give yourself and your friends less reading than others. Justify it as a perk for all the hard work you’ll be doing copying and pasting all those summaries into one document.

2. Brevity. A summary should be a SUMMARY. Writing a novel is annoying, not impressive.

3. Promptness. It is acceptable to hand your summaries in a little late. Don’t delay for more than a day, though, or you might find yourself permanently banished from the study group. And we all know reading sucks.

4. Integrity. Do not share the fruits of your labor with non-group members. Breaching group trust in this manner is only acceptable if it results in you getting laid.

5. Loyalty. Some people join multiple groups and hand in summaries from Group A to Group B. This two-timing action is unacceptable if you are recycling summaries someone else wrote. If you wrote the materials yourself, you must at least check with the leader of Group A before lending your summaries to Group B.

6. Respect your elders. They may have old study guides that they are willing to share.