6 Secrets of Getting Good Grades in College

1. Take control of your destiny. Your grade destiny, that is. There’s no
teacher or parent to remind you every day what you need to do, or to
make sure you’ve studied for exams. It’s all in your hands. So step up
to the plate and take responsibility. The grades you get will depend
on what you yourself do.
2. Don’t overload. Some students think it’s a mark of pride to take as
many course hours as the college allows. It isn’t. Take four or, at the
most, five courses each semester. That way you’ll be able to devote all
your energies to a manageable number of subjects, and you won’t have
to sacrifice quality for quantity.
3. Get your a** to class. Most students have a cutting budget: the
number of lectures they think they can miss in each course and still
do well. But if there are thirty-five class meetings, each class contains
3 percent of the content: miss seven classes, and you’ve missed
20 percent of the material.

4. Take really good notes. In many intro courses, the professor’s lectures
form the major part of the material tested on the midterm and
final. So as you’re taking notes, you’re really writing the textbook for
the course—which in many cases is more important than the official
textbook. Be sure to get down everything the professor says and to
maintain your notes in an organized and readable form. After all,
these are the notes you’ll have to study a number of times later in the
course.

5. Study like you mean it. There’s a difference between studying and
“studying”—and you know what it is. When you’re really studying,
you’re 100 percent focused on and engaged with the material: a total
immersion in what you’re doing and a strong desire to get it right.
When you’re only half-heartedly studying, you’re really only 35 percent
involved, with the other 65 percent of your attention divided
among tweeting your friend about how much you’re studying, scoping
out the surrounding tables to see who else might be around (and
how attractive they are), and daydreaming about all the fun things
you’ll do when you finish this awful studying. Look, we know studying
can be painful, but all students who get A’s do it—no matter what
they tell you.

6. Do all the “extras.” In some courses, there are special end-of-thesemester
activities that can improve your grade. Review sessions,
extra office hours, rewrites of papers, extra-credit work—all of these
can be grade-boosters. Especially in schools where there are no
pluses and minuses, even a few extra points can push your borderline
grade over the hump (from, say, a B-plus to an A-minus—that is,
an A).