How to Perform Poorly in an Online Course

Do not bother to order your text until week 3. After you flunk several quizzes, tell your professor that the course is harder than you thought it would be. Ask to re-take the first five quizzes as you were not able to do any of the homework problems from the text.

Have your brother or sister take the course for you and brag about your fraud while drinking in a bar. Don’t look around to see if there are others from the university that might report your behavior back to the professor.

Do not participate in Chapter Discussion Forums. Discussion Forum participation points can, at most, only affect your course grade one or two letter grades. When you discover after the cut-off date that points are actually assigned for participation, tell your professor that you could not find the chapter discussion forum so you should not be penalized for not participating.

Ignore the "time windows" for taking chapter quizzes and for making postings to the Discussion Forums. They obviously apply to everyone but you.

Do not work the homework; the homework solutions are already provided, so just scan them before taking the quiz.

Go backpacking for a month through small towns in Greece where there is sometimes no electricity even though this means you will not have Internet access for your class. Ask your professor if you can earn extra points for this lack, perhaps a paper on the life and culture that you observed while on your vacation. Ask to have this "extra paper" replace your low or missing scores on your accounting quizzes.

Or, enroll in an online course and then embark on a trip to Europe; do not bother to check your email while out of the country. When you return two weeks into the course, tell your professor that the cities you visited (Paris, Rome, Berlin, London) did not have Internet access so you were unable to log on. Convey immediate surprise that the course would start without you.

Work a full-time job, take two other summer courses concurrently with the online course, and ask yourself why this class is so demanding. Given your busy summer and conflicting priorities, have your spouse, sibling, or parent contact your professor to explain why the online class is at the bottom of your priority list. Have the individual ask the professor to give you a grading scale that is different than that of the rest of the students in the online class.

Source: Actual examples from prior online accounting classes taught by Professor Jim Dodd, Drake University.