Top man.
Every student will promise you that they’ve perfected the art of procrastination, but in the case of Lawrence Kemp, a student at the University of Gloucestershire, he can proudly say that he has mastered it and received top marks.
Or did he?
A few weeks ago, Lawrence’s friend, Danny Cotter, filmed his mate as he desperately tried to complete a 2,000 word business management essay at a nightclub.
Granted, the majority of Lawrence’s work was done before his group of friends started pre-drinking, but his story went viral after people absolutely loved his ‘commitment’ to academia.
In Lawrence’s own words, “To be perfectly honest, I had started a few days prior, but I left my last 750 words and editing to last minute. I fully intended on going out as I hadn’t been out in a while, but the assignment took longer than I thought. So I was reluctant to join my mates until I finished, but I knew I was capable of editing work and enjoying the night,” he said.
Danny picks up the story: “As you can see in the video, we persisted to pester poor Lawrence until he cracked, until he joined in. A few drinks later and it wasn’t too hard for us to convince him the club had WiFi and he could complete it there which of course, it didn’t. He got the laptop into the club through one of our friends working there,” he said.
Well, the latest development in the story saw Lawrence receiving a first for his paper, however, this has been debunked by The Independent.
Danny says “It was for one of our modules called ‘shortform’, in which we were told to make a video and try and get it to go viral.
“We were given a lot of freedom with the brief, so we wanted to make something that was relevant and topical. It’s the end of our student year so everyone’s under pressure with work and exams – we thought why not play on that and try and get the video on a platform.”
The University of Gloucestershire corroborated this account in statement. “As soon as the University became aware that a creative assignment had become the subject of a news story, we contacted media outlets to ensure they understood that this was not a genuine event. We certainly don’t condone misleading the media but we would point out that a simple phone call to the University would have cleared this matter up immediately.”
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