LILLE, France—Midterms have arrived in Lille, and everyone is hunkering down with their books, forgoing parties in favor of study sessions and generally picking it up a notch or two academically. By everyone, of course, I mean the French; international students, as a rule, can't really tell the difference between a hard week and an easy one, a tough assignment and a cinch, midterm week and spring break and so on.

With pass-fail credits and a host of other priorities — travel and nightlife among them — classes here don't inspire the same work ethic in the average American student as they might back home, and the academic aspect of the semester becomes a "good enough" affair.

There are certain things about American classes that we tend to take for granted. We assume a course's program for the year will be laid out on a syllabus right off the bat, with reasonably clear guidelines for evaluation. We assume that our class will be in the same room and at the same time from week to week. We assume that if one of these things changes, our professor will mention it to us, and we assume that if we don't hear otherwise, everything is business as usual.

An American studying in France who holds onto to these expectations will go insane. Classrooms and class times are shuffled on an almost-weekly basis. The changes are announced not by the professor but by Post-It note-sized notices displayed on a jungle of a public bulletin board. Tests are announced in a similar fashion and are scheduled on a strict basis of "whenever is least convenient for you, such as in the middle of another class."

When you actually do make it to class, you can't expect the same academic success you may have enjoyed at home. The saying here about the 0-20 grading scale is that 20 is "reserved for God himself," 19 is for the professor, and top students might pull down an 18 once in a while. French students work fanatically for a 15 or a 16.

By the same token, international students tend to realize that, between the language barrier and their unfamiliarity with the system, stellar grades are more trouble than they're worth. We realize it's OK to struggle a bit. It's OK to hit a rough patch here and there. We're all in it together, and if none of us show up to a geography midterm because none of us figured out we had one, the chances of that midterm being rescheduled are excellent.

And when one student decides to give it his all, to cut through the chaos, to excel as the French do, we can all find the inspiration to do what we need to do: Find this person and stop him at all costs before he destroys us all. Because we've got a good thing going here.