1. Pick the Right Courses. Some easy, some hard. Some for your major, some distribution courses. But mostly, at least one each semester that you have a genuine passion for.
2. Make All the Classes. Though attendance isn’t required in college, each lecture covers 3% of the courses content. Miss four or five, and you’ve missed 15% or 20% of the content. Which practically guarantees you a B (or less).
3. Take Excellent Lecture Notes. Expect to be writing most of the lecture and to produce about a page of notes for each 15 minutes of lecture. Remember, you’ll have to study these notes come exam time, and you can’t study what isn’t there.
4. Anticipate All Test Questions. Use study guides, dropped hints in the lecture, and actual sample exams to construct sample test-questions. Then take your “exam” under timed test-conditions.
5. Make Tests into “Work Sessions.” Think of tests not as the Spanish Inquisition, but as an occasion for you to showcase the material you’ve mastered. Take your time, realize that some questions are meant to be more difficult, and above all, bring something to drink (who doesn’t feel better with a beverage?).
6. Construct the Perfect Paper. Answer exactly the question(s) asked. Begin answering the question in the first sentence. Make sure your paper has a logical structure and moves toward its goal. And make sure every sentence does some work.
7. Don’t “Over-Google.” If you’ve been assigned a research paper (and not all are), use scholarly sources recommended by the Professor — not the 4 million results generated by a Google-search. And focus on those sources that are most relevant to your topic — better to mine 4 or 5 than to scan 10.
8. Conspire with the Professor. The professor wants to see you do well. Go to office hours and review sessions, equipped with questions about your own work. Afterwards, e-mail your prof with any new questions that come up.
9. Don’t Run Out of Gas. In many courses, up to two-thirds of the grade is given in the last month of the semester. Keep up your stamina, shed unnecessary commitments (both personal and academic), and work hardest on courses in which your grade is on the borderline (between a B and an A. or, alas, a C and a B).
10. Tame the Final Exam Period. Begin studying for finals the week before exam period (that way you won’t have to take exams and study at the same time). Don’t pull “all-nighters’ or rely on “substances” while studying. And once an exam is over, fuggetaboutit! (you still have 3 others to take).
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