By Samuel Letchworth

There is a secret for getting good grades. It’s known to those esoteric few who make the A’s and snatch that diploma right out of the dean’s hands at the graduation ceremony, their cap tassels swaggering across the stage as they proceed off into the real world to the sound of cheers and applause.

The secret? Go to class!

Showing up is half of life, or so says the age-old adage.

“That’s how I’ve made it through school this long,” says Jonathan Williams, a senior at the UA. “I just went to class everyday. You’re guaranteed to pass.”

For the past four years, the average freshman dropout rate has been 7.6 percent after the first semester. Nearly 20 percent of freshmen drop out after their first full year.

But with hundreds of majors to choose from, incoming students, or even those who have been here for years, have plenty of academic options.

Each year, there are new and interesting classes added to the course catalog. From an Honors Colloquium on Karl Marx to an open-major class on personal finance to an outdoor class held at the Old Main Lawn on the history of civil disobedience taught by Tibetan monks, the UA has something for everyone.

Registering for those classes is another ballgame entirely. Seniors get first priority, allowed to register for classes weeks before other undergraduates. Then it becomes a mad free-skate scramble for popular classes like Music Lecture with Henry Runkles, Biological Anthropology with Peter Ungar or Poetry with Michael Heffernan. Not to mention core classes that fit into a student’s individual schedule.

Veterans of the university might remember registering for class via telephone through “Hog Call.” “Hog Call” was an automated button-press registration system wherein one would rifle through the catalog of classes, find the one they needed, and call up ol’ “Hog Call.” The student would be greeted by an automated message of a man affecting a cartoonish Southern accent saying, “Way-all cum tuh Hawg Call.” The automated voice would then direct them to punch in the number of the class they wished to take.

“Hog Call” was done away with in 2004. These days, all students register for their classes online at Isis.uark.edu. It is a relatively easy interface to navigate, with department listings arranged in an alphabetical catalog. When one actually successfully enrolls in a class, the experience is not unlike buying a Pink Floyd album on Amazon.com. You simply fill up your icon shopping cart with, say, Dark Side of the Moon, and the system tells you with an exclamatory message that you have, indeed, registered for that class.

Obviously Dark Side of the Moon is not a class offered at the university, though you probably couldn’t tell that to those percentage of freshmen who drop out after their first semester.

Many classes have strict attendance policies. The foreign language departments, for example, generally drop a student an entire letter grade for more than a few absences. So even if you’re reading Tom Sawyer in American Literature class, there is no real justification for “playing hooky.”

Except now that the swine flu pandemic has swept the world and found its way to the UA. If anyone on campus is suspected of having H1N1 swine flu they are advised to stay home and are automatically excused from all class days missed, according to the Pat Walker Health Center.

But honestly, when your professors tell you “come to class”, it is probably best to heed their advice. If you go to class, you might just learn something.