Although academic integrity is an extremely important value you should absolutely uphold throughout your time at UC Berkeley, here’s our power ranking of fake holidays if you ever need to explain missing homework assignments to your professors.

1. Halloween 2

If you find yourself missing homework in mid-November, consider using “Halloween 2” as an excuse. Because of its proximity to Halloween, “Halloween 2” is quite believable and fairly convenient. To really drive it home, you’ll need to snack on leftover candy while wearing a costume for a few lectures. If you still need an excuse after using Halloween 2, you can try “Halloween: The director’s cut,” “Halloween 3,” “Halloween 4” or “Halloween 5.” “Halloween 6” might even carry you into the spring semester.

2. *Insert professor’s name* Day

Ah, National *insert professor’s name* Day, one of my personal favorites. In case you’re not sure how you could turn this one into a valid excuse, we have a template for you. Go ahead and copy and paste, but don’t forget to insert your own professor’s name.

“Hello *insert professor name*, I hope your day is going well. You know, it’s funny I should be emailing you because I was actually just celebrating, well, *insert professor’s name* Day a little while ago. It’s a really important national holiday, and you, *insert professor name,* definitely deserve to be celebrated to the fullest. Unfortunately, during *insert professor’s name* Day, I decided to focus on the festivities and postpone the completion of my homework assignment, which is what I’m emailing you about.”

3. Tuesday

Although this is just a day of the week, how you say it can have a huge effect on how it’s perceived. If you tell your professor about how you had to “prepare for Tuesday” or got “caught up in Tuesday,” well, you just might be able to sell it as a national holiday. But why stop at Tuesday? It turns out that every day of the week can be turned into a holiday by following this method! 

4. Your 30-day birthday anniversary

Or really any number of days after your birthday. I mean, it’s not like the professor knows for sure whether or not you actually celebrate the anniversaries of your birthday. In fact, who are they to say you don’t? The best part of this one is that it’s infinitely reusable, as long as you keep a careful count of the days after your birthday.

Now, just to be clear: We have not actually used any of these excuses before, but hypothetically, they seem pretty foolproof. Since we at the Clog are crawling toward the end of the semester, we figured it would be OK to go ahead and lay it all out for our readers.

This is a satirical article written purely for entertainment purposes.