Disclaimer - this may or may not be an appropriate topic. If it is overstepping the bounds, I fully understand if the mods want to delete it. I’m trying here to exclusively address past drug use and not current, which I understand is allowed by the rules, but it’s up to the mods in the end.
Anyway, on to the question. I remember in my freshman year of college I wrote this paper on the Haskalah (The Jewish Enlightenment) for a 300-level Jewish History class while totally stoned. I managed to tie together the religious studies of Maimonedes with the humanistic philosophy of Moses Mendelssohn, and incorporate them both into this highly convoluted theory about how the tradition of Talmudic study was a precursor to the modern concept of case law, and how that paved the way for the Jews’ success in the legal field.
I got an A on the paper.
Has anyone else had a similar experience? If so, share!
I did very well on an undergrad exam while I was high. But I didn’t intend to be that way. Let me explain.
I had a helluva cold at midterm time. I didn’t dare miss my economics exam–the professor made it very clear that the only excuse for missing is exam was death, and while close, I wasn’t quite there yet. So I visited my doctor and ended up with a prescription for a cough syrup. It turned out to be loaded with codeine. I took a slug and went to write my economics exam.
Thanks to the codeine, I remember very little about writing the exam. But I obviously did. Even though I was high as a kite, that exam turned out to be the best grade I’d get all year on any sort of economics test or exam. Heck, I did better on that exam than I did on some of my other exams too.
Wouldn’t have made it through highschool if I didn’t…
Or at least grade 12 and OAC. My friends were all 19 (legal drinking age in Ontario) and also done school (not in college yet). I was 18 (with a fake id) and still in school. Most days of the week, they’d all want to go to the 'rippers, or just get blasted because they didn’t have to go to school or if they had to work, it was later in the day.
I wrote 4 or 5 papers for english and politics after coming home from a night at the bar. Or if it was a long night and I had a test in the morning, it was not uncommon to be still drunk for the first couple periods. I got some 90+% on some of the tests I wrote while still drunk from the night before. (On the other hand, I was useless for debate in my first period politics class… Which I excelled at when not drunk or hungover)
I stopped drinking on school nights after getting kicked out of college for drinking too much and not doing my work.
The day before my portfolio was to be completed and turned in for my Creative Writing class, I calmed my panic by smoking the rest of my stash of weed. I think it was about 3 fatties. I had several pages of poetry and prose to complete, all in certain styles with only one being author’s choice of style.
In a 8 hour haze I typed out my entire portfolio without even getting up to pee. The next day I had little recollection of the inspiration for any of the writings but somehow I managed to get a B+. The only reason I didn’t get an A+ was that I failed to complete the spoken word portion of the class. (I was ridiculously shy back then.)
Aaaah, the follies of youth.
Btw, 3 fatties now would lay me out for days.
I wasn’t high or drunk, but I was amused when I was presented with a Letter of Commendation for my PSAT score, when I’d overslept and missed a large portion of the test.
Actually I do remember a couple of writing assignments with “chemical inspiration”. One was a deep analysis of Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories which received an A grade.
I’m probably a third of my way done with my bachelor’s and I have a 4.0 GPA. Yes, I’m proud of myself. And I haven’t written ANYTHING while not sucking down a beer or two or three or four. I seem to make more sense when I’m drinking and my professors seem to agree.
Does my entire high school career count? I graduated with a 3.9 non-weighted GPA. I remember approximately a third of the 4 years, and literally skipped more days than I attended my senior year (that was the 1 year they decided to try the “as long as your grades/assignments are done, we won’t fault you for attendance” schtick. Obviously, some of us took advantage)
As for specific papers/assignments – I once wrote a critique of Angela Dickenson’s poetry (I LOATHE that woman, my teacher worshipped her) while tripping on the best LSD I’d ever had – the words were floating off the paper as I wrote them. There were some seriously amazing visuals – I got an A+, even though I ripped into her, the paper was probably one of the best I have ever written.
I developed a Plan when I turned 21. I call it Plan B, for “Booze”.
When an assignment is coming out horribly, you cannot figure out what is wrong with it or how to fix it, and it simply cannot get any worse – save a backup copy, and start drinking. Revisit and revise sober the next day. It’s a method of last resort, but it’s worked for me so far.
Also, an experience similar to Spoons up there, except it was a nasty upper respiratory critter of some sort, and instead of codeine I was tenuously balanced on a combination of diphenhydramine and pseudoephedrine. It was also a sociology exam of short essay questions, which fortunately for me tend to place less emphasis on the ‘right’ answer and more emphasis on a ‘reasonable’ answer.
Then there was the time I stayed up for three days running and found myself waking up in a heap, about seven hours after I was supposed to have taken a physics exam. My roommate was very confused when I started to panic; she happened to share that class with me, and apparently I had in fact walked all the way down to the physics building in the snow, sat next to her at the exam, hung around to wait for her afterwards, and walked all the way back to our dorm room before conking out in my own bed. I remember none of this. Judging from the grade I got in the class, I pulled a B on the exam.
In college I took a BASIC programming class. After the first class I explained to the teacher that the last language I had written in was Assembly in a high school AP class and asked if I could just hand in all the assignments on the last day. Oddly enough she let me. She gave me all the homework for the semester and I handed it all in towards the end of the year. Those were the only two classes I went to. I went to the exam blasted out of my head and absolutley reeking of pot. I gotta a B in the class.
Almost the same here – I went to a party the night before the exam and got home waaaay late. I got to the PSAT/NMSQT on time, but I was exhausted and kind of in a fog. I ended up with the highest score in the school and won a National Merit Scholarship as a result.
Unfortunately I only got the basic letter of commendation, nothing above that. I’m not sure I knew the PSAT was that day, or that there were scholarships or anything. I was just late, don’ know that I was real tired once I was there. I would have had a chance at scoring the best in my school, probably. I did better on the SAT, almost perfect except I was slow and didn’t finish one section of the math test.
I can code better when I have a little bit of alcohol. I am not a logic type of guy so programming is not my forte, but when I have a beer or a glass of wine, I think more logically and linearly. After two or three though and I can’t concentrate enough, or care enough to continue, so I don’t do it often because it is hard to maintain the balance of one beer within X amount of time is good, but 1 beer and then another within that same X period of time and I surf the internet too much.
Last semester in my Enology class we had to do an oral presentation on a wine of our choice. We were all asked to bring in a couple of bottles of the wine we were going to talk about (basically, how the wine was made, what we liked or didn’t like about it, why we chose it, if we’d do anything different as the winemaker, etc.) to share with the class.
I was the very last person to do my presentation. I’d tasted about 20 wines by my turn, and even though tastes are generally small pours, 20 of them will add up if you aren’t spitting (which I wasn’t, since my husband was driving.)
Anyway, I was pretty well buzzed when I went up. And got an A.
Probably about half of the exams I took in University I was one or the other or both. I also had a habit of sleeping on the floor in the back of the class. I somehow still managed to come out near the top of the class. I have trouble remembering a good portion of my undergrad but there are two particular examples that I can remember.
During my first semester I went over to help a couple friends study for our calculus final the next morning. We spent about 20 minutes studying and proceeded to get completely blitzed for the entire night. I’m sure I was still stoned the next day but managed to still get in the 90s.
I took a statistics course required as part of my Management Sciences Option. The class was open to more than just engineering students so it was an easier class. During one lunch a couple friends and I were at the on-campus pub. There was one guy in this class with me and he all of a sudden remembered we had a mid-term that started about 20 minutes earlier. We quickly finished our pitchers (yes, we each had our own individual pitcher and I was probably half way through my second). We showed up about a third of the way through the midterm. I was the first one to finish the exam and he was next about 10 minutes later. I don’t recall what I got on the exam but I think I ended up with either the highest or close to the highest grade in the class, somewhere in the 90s.
Of course there were many other times where being is this semi-perpetual state didn’t work out, process control being a notable example.
Ha, once upon a time, when I was a biology major, I took a general chemistry final exam with an acute attack of gastroenteritis and what felt like one hell of a fever. Taking care not to sit next to any other people (which was standard policy anyways), I managed to get a B on the exam, when I hadn’t gotten anything even close to that in any previous general chem exam. Wowsa.
I also delivered a presentation in German while rather drunk. Apparently, my foreign language competence becomes amazing when I’m drunk.
Yah, I’ve written several papers while drunk, and I’ve never gotten anything lower than a 92 on a college paper. I wrote one paper on Jude the Obscure in a bar - actually, my favorite British pub, which served not pints, but quarts - the night before it was due. I got a 98 on that paper. It was about the way that the public house acts as a metaphor for Jude’s state of mind throughout the book, so I guess it was appropriate that I wrote it in a pub.
I’ve been writing all my papers sober this year, and while I’m much less nervous about the final outcome when I hand them in, it just doesn’t seem to be as much fun.
Almost every final I’ve taken has been while I was blitzed on cold syrup. I consistently catch the nastiest strain of whatever flu/cold is going around about two days before final exams. One year, I didn’t even know that we had a final, and swung by the class to pick up some graded papers only to discover that the final had been underway for about 45 minutes. I have absolutely no idea what I wrote - I only remember using a piece of notebook paper to blow my nose when I ran out of kleenex - but I got a score in the low nineties.
I did much of my undergrad thesis while on a 7 day binge in the west of Ireland with my friend. I aced the thesis, getting nearly top of my class. Alas that formula doesn’t work anymore in my postgrad days.
