Constitutional Law Superstar Exposed as Fraud

Today in my Con Law I class, in the midst of a discussion of (what else?) Marbury v. Madison, I decided that I should finally make an effort to distinguish myself from the mass of students studiously avoiding the professor's eyes. Accordingly, I shrewdly awaited an opportunity to volunteer an answer in class. This is harder than it looks. Many of the questions presented by the professors are carefully laid traps, or otherwise lead to treacherous hypotheticals that end in shattered first-year egos. So choosing which question to assay (when a student has that luxury) is as much a matter of reading the professor's pedagogical intent as it is about knowing the material. Furthermore, even presuming a question that is on the level, the student must judge whether he is sufficiently sure of his answer and ability to articulate it well before throwing his hand into the air. Professors will usually give him some credit solely for the attempt, but unless he nails the answer he will not be remembered except as a well-intentioned bumbler.

With these reservations firmly in mind, I lurked around the fringes of the class discussion until the moment to strike should present itself. And lo, within a few minutes it did. The professor posed a question, sufficiently obscure to present a challenge, but asked with straightforward intent. All the conditions for determining a good candidate question for classroom participation had been met, but still I hesitated. It did not feel right to answer this particular question, because my knowledge of the answer seemed comparatively ill-gotten. It had not come from my incredible insight based on the assigned reading, or a cognitive quantum leap. No, I knew the answer because last week, I happened to overhear the professor mention the relevant statute in a conversation with another student. The statute name was odd enough to stick with me, even though I had not seen fit to research or read it myself. Could I ethically use this information, given to me (though unknowingly) by the professor himself, to make it look like I was mastering the material? I mean, it was bad enough that I had been eavesdropping to begin with, but to actually use what I had discovered to my advantage would be a whole new level of wrong.

Still, I didn't know when my next opportunity would arise for a slam-dunk in this class, and meanwhile the discussion had dragged on fruitlessly for some minutes. Eventually, I took a deep breath, thought "It's only this once," and took the plunge. Once I gave the answer that I knew the professor was holding out for, a funny half-quizzical, half-admiring look came over his face (I don't know if he expected anyone to get this one), and he restated it to the class without further modification or comment. I breathed a sigh of relief. Now, even if I flub an answer or two in class this semester, at least I made a good first impression.

However, by some strange twist of fate, I was not yet done piping up in Con Law class today. As I feared, a heretofore quiet student pulling the perfect answer out of his hat is just inviting the professor to issue further challenges designed to ascertain whether the student is skilled or merely extraordinarily lucky. So it was that I found myself, several minutes later, on the receiving end of a question about the interpretation of the 1789 Judiciary Act. By some bizarre coincidence, this was also a question that I could answer well, but for an equally stupid reason. The differing interpretations of this poorly-written Act turn on the grammatical function of a single semicolon. I knew this because of a web article, totally unrelated to Marbury, on which I had stumbled over the summer. So it was that I gave another gem of a response, my second of the evening, and cemented my place in the class's firmament of intellectual superstars. The only problem? I did it by dumb luck, and now I feel super uncomfortable about the whole situation.

After class, people complimented me on a "great pull" for that "brilliant semicolon thing." I got a high-five from some guy. Girls from the lecture hall smiled coyly and waved as they passed me on campus (weird). How am I supposed to tell them that it was all a freak accident? And will I be able to keep up this impossibly high standard when class meets on Thursday?