By the necessity of their philosophical descent, each member of the fraternity denounced the other as unequal to his lofty task and inadequate to grasp it.
Now, " brown nosing" , we're generally trying to say that your work isn't good enough for you to get it, so when you brown nose you feel that your work isn't good enough.
What this all means is that the structure of the stuff sitting up in your cranium isn't up to the task of preparing for a test – so you need to build external structures to help it out.