Attention: Stop studying!

Researchers interviewed hundreds of students and faculty from different universities, subjecting participants to a rigorous series of surveys and psychological testing. Their startling findings have profound consequences for all college students.

Surprisingly, researchers now believe that there may be a direct correlation between a person's level of academic achievement and their level of what researchers call "common sense."

Researchers found that as we gain in academic achievement, there is a corresponding drop in our ability to use common sense reasoning. These effects become more and more pronounced with increasing levels of academic achievement.

For this study, participants were asked to answer questions from two categories: academic questions and common sense questions. An example of an academic question might be "What are the first three digits of Pi?" The common sense questions were things like "Which do you put on first: shoes or socks?"

Undergraduate students, in their first and second years, performed fairly well on both series of questions, but undergraduates in their third and fourth years showed a marked increase in their scores on the academic portion and a corresponding drop in their scores on the common sense questions.

The problem became more pronounced when researchers sampled graduate students.

One researcher commented, "By the Masters degree level, participants were only able to answer around 10 percent of the common sense questions. By the time a person has reached the PhD level, forget about it!"

Professors and other instructors seemed to have the lowest level of common sense out of any of those sampled. Given a list of common household objects and asked to pick which might be useful in a rainstorm, 75 percent of professors chose "calculator" over "umbrella."

When asked "Which side of the stairs is it best to walk on?" one professor commented, "I can answer that question, but I will need my computer."

The results of this study may not come as much of a surprise to many college students who have come to expect bizarre behavior from their professors. It may also help explain to many upper-level university students why they seem to find themselves wearing unmatched socks and forgetting where they left their keys.

Some readers may wonder what they can do to avoid this unfortunate decline in common reasoning ability. Researchers say that the only way to avoid this pattern is to drop out immediately. One researcher comments, "If you feel you have to stay in school, do yourself a favor and try not to think about it too much: we have found that the sharpest decline in reasoning comes just after finals and mid-terms."

The researchers involved in this study were themselves not immune to the aforementioned decline in reason. In the words of one of the study's facilitators: "We would have finished the study about a year earlier, but unfortunately our computers broke down and no one could figure out how to work the pencil."