First off, I get it, ok? You’ve gone through eleven and a half years of school, it’s easy for the last five or six months to feel pointless. I mean, who can blame you for your missing assignments once you’ve gotten into your dream school and all you can think about is kissing DCPS goodbye? 

But the fact of the matter is that it’s more complicated than that. Senioritis may seem harmless to the average 12th grader, but if you decide to take it too far, it can be bad news.

Just because your revised APUSH DBQs and 5.0 GPA got you accepted to an Ivy League doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ll stay accepted. While Bs or Cs likely won’t get someone rejected from a school, if your grades drop below that you may be in trouble. Chances are that you’ll still make it in—maybe with a stern email telling you to get better grades—but it’s possible that the school you’ve been working your butt off to get into for the last three years gives you the boot when you’re three months from the finish line. What would you rather do: spend some extra time finishing Dr. Canedo’s latest thirty page note assignment, or roll the dice and hope that all of your hard work doesn’t go down the drain? 

This is the part where I get all preachy, because senioritis is just not justified in my eyes. There are simply too many reasons to maintain your momentum, starting with the fact that it’s not a good idea to slack off with college right around the corner. For most students, you would be kicking all of your academic habits just a couple of months before you’re going to need them in a more rigorous setting. True, you will probably lose those habits over the course of summer as well, but if you slack off from February until August, you’ll have a much harder time getting back into that academic rhythm.

Beyond losing your study habits, senioritis also makes taking Advanced Placement classes pointless. AP classes provide three real benefits: you get graded on a 5.0 scale, you get more informative lessons, and you get the opportunity to preemptively earn college credits. If a senior completely blows off their work in an AP class, then these benefits become void. If you don’t pay attention to assignments and lessons, you probably won’t get a good enough score on your AP exams to earn college credit. 

Even if you aren’t taking AP classes, there are still good reasons to not slack off in class. Seniors get first pick of courses for their schedule, and by the time you’re in your senior year, there are probably only a handful of classes that you still need to take to graduate. This means that the classes you are taking are generally ones you chose to be in. Granted, you may not necessarily want to do the work for those classes, but in that case, you’re wasting the opportunity to learn about subjects that interest you.

To me, that’s the biggest issue with senioritis. For all of its flaws, our school offers some really interesting and engaging courses, entirely for free. I understand wanting to call it quits once it feels like you’ve got a foot out the door, but there are still plenty of opportunities to learn and grow at school before you graduate. Slacking off and leaving Jackson-Reed with all Cs may seem tempting, but not only can it hurt your college admissions, it also wastes the educational opportunities you already have. Overall, senioritis only hurts you as a student.

Don’t take a full schedule senior year though…that’s a bit too much.