Excuses, excuses! We love 'em. Our national credo seems to be, "Any excuse is better than none." One college president, after years of working with students, said that he was not sure whether the degree B.A. stood for Bachelor of Arts or Builder of Alibis.(1)

Douglas Bernstein, a psychology professor at the University of Illinois, recently asked faculty members for the "most unusual, bizarre and amazing student excuses" they had ever heard. He got dozens.(2) Listen:

• Grandparent death: an old favorite, but one professor's class established some sort of record when 14 out of 250 students reported their grandmothers' deaths just before final exams. In another class a student reported that he could not take the mid-term because his grandmother had died. When the instructor expressed condol…