We don’t know where the expression about giving it the “old college try” comes from and, since the last day to drop a class or change it to pass-not pass was Friday, we prefer not to learn too much about it.

Halloween fell on an excellent weekend this year. After standing in line and turning in drop slips to the people in the Enrollment Services Center, we all had the opportunity to dress up, go out and celebrate cutting ourselves loose from a class that would have otherwise acted like an anchor on our grade point averages.

On the other hand, maybe you forgot. Wouldn’t that be something? You’d have to start going to class again, read that expensive textbook you paid for, do the homework and maybe make a few friends in class so you can study together. Maybe your Halloween horrors of cemeteries and the undead also will haunt your academic life this week.

What a great holiday to put smack dab in the middle of forgetting to get your drop slip signed and remembering that you needed to have an X put on your transcript.

You may notice that dropping a course comes with a few provisos or quid pro quos, similar to the restrictions on a genie’s wish-granting ability. (For those of you who don’t remember Disney’s “Aladdin,” they can’t kill people, bring them back from the dead or make them fall in love.) You can only have five drops, and processing a pink slip costs $12.

There’s only so many chances the university can give you before you should get it. At some point, probably when you find yourself seriously having to give it the old college try, you have to start putting forth some effort. The students who waltz into class, sit down and expect professors to give them the answers to the test instead of challenging their ability are the ones who don’t do well.

School — at any level — isn’t about how well you can fill in bubbles on a Scantron sheet. A trained monkey can do that. School is about doing some critical thinking and working out a problem, whether that be in a physics lab or researching a history paper in the library. The answers are there; they exist. You just have to go find them.

College is not and should not be a cakewalk. The bureaucracy of dropping a class beyond your limit of five may be frustrating and you may be unsuccessful. But that process will probably teach you something. Get your act together and get the drop slipped signed (really, meeting with professors isn’t that bad) or collect yourself and do the work expected of everyone else in the class.

If you want a walk in the park, go to a park. Come to college prepared to work.