According to urbandictionary.com, senioritis is “a crippling disease that strikes high school seniors. Symptoms include: laziness, an over-excessive wearing of track pants, old athletic shirts, sweatpants, athletic shorts, and sweatshirts. Also features a lack of studying, repeated absences, and a generally dismissive attitude. The only known cure is a phenomenon known as graduation.”

Many seniors do in fact just decide that they are done dressing nicely for their final year in high school, but that is not the point of this article.

Was I going to give up in my epic search to find a cure for senioritis other than graduation? I was pretty close when I heard about the nice sweatpants I could be wearing, but I continued to research and looked for any answers out there. Let’s look at what I uncovered.

First of all, many students believe that college admission offices don’t look at your senior year grades while others think that they just look at the grades from your first half of twelfth grade. But both groups are wrong. College admissions counselors will look at grades from your entire senior year and if you decided to slack off during your last year of high school, you could actually get denied to the college that accepted you earlier.

You are required to list the courses you are taking your senior year on your college application. This means that the schools at which you apply are going to see if you have five out periods on your schedule. Competitive schools like to see that you are taking some difficult courses your senior year and it could make a difference in the determination of whether or not you are accepted.

Lastly, paying for college is not like buying a can of soda at the card shop; it can be an enormous investment these days. The majority of colleges give out merit scholarships to students with outstanding GPAs, so if you can keep your grades up during your senior year, you are prone to save some dough for yourself when it comes to paying off those student loans.

It really is as simple as that. You can now attempt to avoid senioritis or you can skip out on college. The decision is yours.