Dear Tree of Knowledge,
I have fallen into a miserable state of affairs where I am always coupled with a slacker for group projects. They socially loaf from me and take a free ride off of my work. This makes me so angry. How can I get them to do their fair share?
—Perpetrating Partner

Dear Partner,
Perpetrate you should. A social loafer is nothing to be indifferent about and you’re going to have to get them to help you. We all know that shoving nonsensical motivators into someone’s personal space to get them to believe they need to do certain things never works (just look at what the anti-evolution people in the park blocks have accomplished…). No, measures must be even more manipulative. You’re going to have to trick your partner into contributing.

Let us analyze said partner. If a true slacker, they will have skimmed the prompt lightly enough to forget the questions. This is because they have better things to do (e.g. checking social networking sites, badminton club, loitering outside the Plaid, etc.). And because humans have a way of encapsulating themselves into routines in a subconsciously unwavering manner, opportunities arise to slip tasks into habitual practices.

First, if you see your partner online, use instant messenger chat to provoke enlightening conversations that you can later simply copy and paste into the project. If you are examining character progression in Fitzgerald’s classic, ask something like, “How do you think Gatsby developed throughout the novel?” Just make sure to replace “Gatsby” with a sad but smokin’ actor and “novel” with the latest romantic comedy. Secondly, come to their badminton practice with your poster board, secretly substituting birdies with relevant photographs and documents and get that lazy lame-o to slap together your speech visual aid.

If neither works and you find your partner loitering outside of the Plaid, the least mind-engaging activity in the world, you will have to officially designate them as incompetent. Try this argument with your teacher to get a partner switch. An unsympathetic teacher doesn’t mean you’re SOL yet. Just offer your partner minuscule amounts of money at this time. I know, I know; this sounds completely and utterly, entirely and wholly, fully and absolutely, outrighteously and unreservedly, like the greatest idea I have ever had. You were going to use those five dollars to buy your fat ass a burrito, anyway.

Partner, you’ve come a long way in the tribulations of group work. It’s just another one of those dirty things you have to get by to graduate, you know, kinda like learning. Creating the following misleading circumstances might be challenging, but probably not as difficult as letting one’s autonomous masterpiece be co-signed by lazy, filthy metacarpals.