When I was in school, I cheated on my metaphysics exam: I looked into the soul of the boy sitting next to me.

I am returning this otherwise good typing paper to you because someone has printed gibberish all over it and put your name at the top.

Not only is this incomprehensible, but the ink is ugly and the paper is from the wrong kind of tree.

God does not much mind bad grammar, but He does not take any particular pleasure in it.

One day a professor was giving a big test to his students. He handed out all of the tests and went back to his desk to wait. Once the test was over, the students all handed the tests back in. The professor noticed that one of the students had attached a $100 bill to his test with a note saying "A dollar per point." The next class the professor handed the tests back out. The student got his test back with $64 change.

In a forest a fox bumps into a little rabbit, and says, "Hi, junior, what are you up to?" "I'm writing a dissertation on how rabbits eat foxes," said the rabbit. "Come now, friend rabbit, you know that's impossible!" "Well, follow me and I'll show you." They both go into the rabbit's dwelling and after a while the rabbit emerges with a satisfied expression on his face. Comes along a wolf. "Hello, what are we doing these days?" "I'm writing the second chapter of my thesis, on how rabbits devour wolves." "Are you crazy? Where is your academic honesty?" "Come with me and I'll show you." As before, the rabbit comes out with a satisfied look on his face and a diploma in his paw. Finally, the camera pans into the rabbit's cave and, as everybody should have guessed by now, we see a mean-looking, huge lion sitting next to some bloody and furry remnants of the wolf and the fox. The moral: It's not the contents of your thesis that are important -- it's your PhD advisor that really counts.

Some fascinating research shows, however, that if you can convince people that smarts come from what people do, rather than what they were born with, performance improves markedly. In a study with Stanford undergraduates, randomly selected students were persuaded to believe that intelligence was malleable rather than fixed. Over two months later, they reported being more engaged in and enjoying the academic process more than students in control conditions. More impressively, students persuaded to believe that smartness was malleable got better grades the next term, especially African-American students. (<em>they footnote the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 22 (2001):1-13, available at http://www.atkinson.yorku.ca/~jsteele/files/04082317412924405.pdf</em>)