Episode III: Revenge of the Cynic

I was reading a piece on Guardian Unlimited about the Portrait of the student as a young swot and feel it is important to point out that we're not all as godly as those they chose to write about.

Perhaps the most glaringly obvious mistake they made while researching the piece was failing to interview a first year student. From my experiences in what some might refer to as a university (I don't), I have seen a very different picture, from first years at least.

The first house I lived in during my first year was made completely untenable by two of my fellow residents who insisted on getting smashed off their faces literally every night, being as loud as possible, getting up at 3pm and taking class A substances in our kitchen.

This certainly doesn't add any weight to their notion of the student as a young swot. I am being harsh, though. There was a significant proportion of the good to go up against the bad, and suffice to say, most got through to the second year. The thing is, you only really get the real bums in the first year, which is very much an exercise in sorting the wheat from the chaff. The guy who always watched DVDs and played games is gone, as is the tit who spent most of his time chain smoking gaspers.

Look hard enough, though, and you will find the ones who slipped through the net. The accomplice of the spliff chuffing monkey boy, one of the two who made my life hell for my first term, and the odd one who got away with a piss poor result in a vital exam.

Call me a competetive bastard, but I would have liked to have seen more people ejected from their courses after year one. But it seems this uni is too soft on such issues, particularly on my course where it seems virtually impossible to fail. Maybe it's because my standards are too high, or maybe it's simply because it's a poncey art college.