In high school, I was an average student who barely stayed above a 3. As a first-generation university student, I was facing a new life, environment, and community. I had an epiphany—the more I stress about my GPA, the less time I will spend actually improving my academic skills.
I then developed a strategy to achieve a 4. Accept that achieving a 4. Certainly, a 4. I found this to be the most difficult step, as convincing yourself of this is no small task. But once you do it, you will find that your stress will peel back quite a bit! While it is great to get a 4. Most universities realize that you will be dealing with a lot in your first semester and often try to get their students to have an easy academic beginning.
Take advantage of this and work hard! As opposed to high school, you actually have a gigantic amount of control over your schedule in university.
I found it useful spread out the most difficult courses and buffer them with simpler classes, letting me focus and devote more of my time to the difficult classes. While you may not know precisely how challenging a professor will be and how much you might struggle with the content, you do know your strengths. For instance, I took two history courses, an art history course, a PE course, a general education course, and a mathematics course my first semester.
I was able to focus my energy and time on the mathematics course until I was able to master it. Needless to say, I earned an A in the course and the other courses, thereby achieving a 4. A tutor can be your best friend! There is no shame in getting help from someone who has mastered the content. As a tutor myself, I have often been able to assist students with giving some interesting information about the professor they have. For instance, some professors like when you add extra information pertaining to a topic of their interest.
A typical course might have the following assignments. Yale was the first U. The university tracked student progress in a "book of averages" that set procedures for exams and mentions a 4-point scale. Today, the GPA system is widely used by middle schools, high schools, and colleges throughout the U.
Most schools calculate GPA on a 0. Each of your letter grades or percentage grades, depending on the school receives a numeric equivalent. The average of those equivalencies becomes your cumulative GPA. Source: College Board. The average high school GPA is around 3. This also happens to be the minimum requirement for many college scholarships , though a 3. GPA plays a key role in college admissions. This is because your high school GPA is one of the few data-supported measurements of your academic abilities, lending objective evidence to a highly subjective admissions process.
When researching colleges, look at first-year class data to find the average high school GPA of admitted applicants. This should help you figure out what GPA to aim for. For example, if the average first-year student had a 3. Whether a GPA is considered good in high school also depends on your major. A student planning to major in engineering with only a 2.
Check out these time management tips to help you stay on track academically. As important as your academic success is, you should not stress over having a perfect GPA. As long as you are committed to your education and are taking the necessary steps to do your best, you are on the right track.
Department of Labor, Occupational Outlook Handbook Multiple factors, including prior experience, age, geography market in which you want to work and degree field, will affect career outcomes and earnings. Herzing neither represents that its graduates will earn the average salaries calculated by BLS for a particular job nor guarantees that graduation from its program will result in a job, promotion, salary increase or other career growth.
Subscribe to our Newsletter. How To Overcome Test Anxiety. Do I Need a Cover Letter? Get the latest news you need to know, from study hacks to interview tips to career advancement. Have it delivered right to your inbox twice a week. Hi, how can I assist you? Chat Now. Sophia Sikowski. How to Get a 4. Attend study sessions or join a study group Some professors hold study sessions right before a major exam or project so students can get personalized help if they need it.
Attend ALL of your classes Regular attendance is crucial. Do not mix the two. You're nowhere near as good at multitasking as you think you are. Focus on one thing, and then focus on another. Recently, I went to a coffee shop and watched a college student at the table next to me try to study chemistry while using her phone.
It was painful to watch: she'd read a page for two minutes, get a text, respond to it, and then browse Facebook for five minutes. Overall, it took her an hour to get through three pages. She likely wasn't super motivated to study to begin with hence why I started this guide with that high-level principle , but the bad study habits guarantee she's wasting her time. Not only was she getting nowhere with her studying, but she also probably wasn't enjoying texting and browsing Facebook all that much either.
A lose-lose. If you really have a problem with this, I suggest timing yourself just to see how much time you're wasting. Get a chess clock and force yourself to time yourself when you're studying and when you're using your phone. If you need to use the computer while you work, there are browser tools such as RescueTime that track what websites you've visited and for how long.
You can see how much time you're spending researching and how much time you're spending just watching YouTube. You can also block distracting websites for a certain period of time.
A lot of teachers have spare class time or downtime. Typically students just chat with each other until the bell rings. Use that time to do your homework you would otherwise do at night. I remember AP Computer Science was an easy class. I'd finish assignments within 10 minutes and then work on homework the rest of the hour.
In another history class, the teacher's lectures were unhelpful and I was better off just reading the chapter by myself at home. I took that time to work on other homework. Note that some teachers get really annoyed when you do this, so be careful. There's also lunchtime, which is a little less than an hour. Many students sit at the lunch tables and chat until the bell rings.
I banded together with a bunch of other nerd friends in the library and just did homework. Every day, this saved me more than two hours of time. When I got home, I'd only have a few hours of homework and studying left, which freed up room for extracurriculars and a few games of Starcraft.
This is also partly why I was able to go to sleep before 11 pm every night, even with my extracurriculars. Now, this isn't the coolest thing to do and you might be afraid of looking like a nerd. But if you think it's a good idea, you generally shouldn't lead your life based on what other people think about you anyway. Procrastination affects pretty much everyone in multiple aspects of life. Everyone knows that feeling of how much easier it is to put off studying for a test so that you can get an extra half hour to watch Netflix.
Before you know it, though, it's time to sleep and you haven't done anything. We have an excellent guide on why procrastination happens and how to overcome it , in the context of test prep. I highly recommend reading it.
As a summary, procrastination happens when 1 you feel you're in the wrong mood to finish a task, and 2 you assume your mood will change in the near future. This can lead to a vicious cycle wherein you feel guilty for procrastinating, making it even harder to summon the energy to be productive again.
Tests typically make up the majority of how you're graded in a class. Teachers need a way to assess your knowledge in a standardized way that's hard to cheat on, and tests are the best way or the least bad way to do this. Learning how to prepare for tests and how to get great scores reliably is critical to getting straight As. The most important piece to this is understanding what's being tested the "content" and how it'll be tested the "format"—e.
This will directly determine what you study and how you prepare for the test. You likely already know this intuitively—how you study for a math test is pretty different from how you study for a Spanish test.
For math, you run through a lot of practice problems. For Spanish, you memorize vocab and practice grammar rules.
Step 1: Understand the test content and format Step 2: Define your test-prep strategy, integrating reading, practice questions, and review Step 3: Execute your study strategy Step 4: Test yourself Step 5: Improve your method and go back to Step 3. Even within the same subject, different teachers have different styles. You and your friend might be taking the same course—say, AP US History—with different teachers but have entirely different tests. Your teacher might emphasize fact memorization and have mainly multiple-choice questions gridded in through scantrons, whereas your friend's teacher might emphasize big-picture concepts and use tests consisting mainly of essays and free responses.
The way you prepare for each test is thus very different. Teachers are usually consistent in how they test from year to year, so chances are this year's tests will look a lot like last year's. In college it's common for professors to give access to previous years' exams as practice tests. Good high school teachers will do this because they don't recycle tests and want to give students fair exposure to what the test will be like.
On the other hand, bad teachers will hide previous years' tests because they are lazy, want to recycle the tests, and don't want to give resourceful students an unfair advantage. If you have friends or know upperclassmen who took the class with that teacher, ask if they've saved their tests. You can set up an exchange among your friends wherein you share materials from classes that others will take in the future. Lazy teachers really hate this because it forces them to write new exams each year, but that's part of their job.
Note that you should of course be careful and avoid allegations of cheating. If you're worried about this, feel free to ask your teacher how he feels about it before you try to get previous year's tests. And, of course, don't do anything dumb like plagiarizing someone's essay. Don't be annoying about this. Remember what I said about giving teachers what they want. Teachers often hate the question, "Is this going to be on the test?
If they say no, students stop paying attention. If they say yes, students won't appreciate the greater meaning of what they're learning.
Most teachers really do care about how their students are learning and get excited when they see students with a genuine love of learning.
A more palatable way of doing this is to be proactive. Prepare a high-level overview of content that you believe is on the test, and the format in which it'll be tested. Go to the teacher and ask her to take a quick look. Make it clear that you're asking because you care about doing well on the test and you want to understand the teacher's expectations.
You might even offer to save the teacher time by circulating this to your classmates so that she won't have to talk to 20 different students about what's on the test. Remember, if you can make the teacher's life easier, she'll love it.
If you do this earnestly and not in an obviously groveling way, the teacher will typically be more than happy to help because it's clear you care about your education. Even if you have zero information about the first test and you go in blind, the second test will likely look a lot like the first one. Halfway through the course, you'll be comfortable with how the teacher thinks and be able to predict the tests with high accuracy. The worst class I've ever taken was AP Biology my freshman year of high school.
The teacher was a middle-aged man who was profoundly uninspiring. Every day he'd turn off the lights, sit in front of the class with an overhead projector, and go line by line through the teacher notes provided by the book Campbell's Biology. He would literally just read each bullet point, add a sentence or two, and move on. He had a monotone voice, and half the students treated this class as nap time though as I suggest above, the smarter thing would've been to work on other homework during this time.
Thinking about his inefficacy as a teacher is infuriating to this day. The worst part of the class was how the tests were created.
They were entirely multiple choice and often tested trivia straight from the book. There wasn't really any high-level thinking involved—the only way to do well on them was to memorize each chapter before the test. I remember the worst question was a trivial fact from the caption of an image —I think it was the species name of a bird—that was totally irrelevant to what we needed to know for genuine understanding.
He'd just decided it was a good way to test whether someone had memorized the chapter. This struck fear into all of us. After bombing the first test, I had to change my approach. I started reading every chapter six times to memorize all the details. I'd highlight details like a madman to make sure I wasn't missing anything that might be tested.
I'd create my own quizzes before reading the chapter so I could assess how well I was memorizing the details. The key point is that I customized how I prepared to the content and the format of the test. My approach would have been totally inappropriate for another AP Biology class, but it was the right one for this class. Going into the end of the school year, I had an A and was safe. It took a ton of work but I did it. Unfortunately, the teacher realized that because of how crappy of a job he'd done at teaching, the average grade in his class was going to be a C, and he was probably going to get a lot of hate from parents and the administration.
He decided at the end of the year to administer a sample AP test that was entirely extra credit. The upside to this was that the actual AP test was super easy because I had literally memorized the entire textbook. NOTE: This is one of the most important points in this entire guide.
I work with so many students who don't understand this and it's killing their potential to improve. If something you're trying isn't giving you the results you want after a lot of trials, it's clear that you need to reexamine your strategy. If you're cutting broccoli for dinner and you chop off a piece of your finger every night, it's pretty obvious you need to change how you're using the knife unless you love adding iron to your family's diet.
For some reason, this isn't as obvious in the context of coursework. If you get a C on a test, you might be tempted to believe that if you use the same study methods but just study twice as hard, you'll raise your grade to an A. If the cause of your poor performance was truly a lack of time, then this can work. You can use my advice above to carve out more time for studying. But in many cases, this is wishful thinking. It's as though you need to tunnel through a brick wall, and you're trying to get through by pounding your head against it.
You're failing to make a dent, but you believe if you pound three times as hard you'll be able to get through it. There's something wrong with this strategy, and you need to understand why you've failed and how you can improve.
I think the reason this is so difficult in the context of coursework is that students don't understand the root cause of why they've failed.
If you get a B on an essay, it seems tempting to think that you just need to spend more time researching and writing your essay, but really your weakness might be that you just don't understand the teacher's standards and are playing a totally different ball game. This is why I stress the importance of the high-level concepts above.
If you understand that academic success is a combination of multiple factors—motivation, time management, effective learning, understanding of class grading, teacher expectations, and the actual content—you'll be able to pinpoint your weaknesses more effectively. You should treat every evaluation as an opportunity for reflection and improvement. Remember the growth mindset we discussed above. Every disappointing homework assignment and test gives you a chance to reflect on how you failed and how you'll avoid these mistakes in the future.
First, you obtain a measurement. This is often a grade on a homework assignment or test. If it's lower than your standards, something needs to change. Next, you reflect on what happened. Here's a checklist of questions to ask yourself:. This is comprehensive and might sound tedious, but it's critical to improvement.
In my experience with test prep, this is often the second-biggest barrier that prevents students from improving their test scores the first is not putting in enough time, period. Sometimes this analysis can be quick—you forgot to proofread your essay and your grammar mistakes got you points taken off. Clearly, next time you should dedicate time to spellchecking. On the other extreme, after a lot of reflection you might not even know where to begin. Then you can ask the teacher for help.
Remember what I said above—if you go to the teacher with clear introspection and questions, this will show you really care about your education.
Take notes on this reflection, especially on your plan for next time. Write this down as a commitment to yourself. The next time you have a chance for evaluation, such as a test or assignment, review these notes and implement your plan.
In the last stage of the cycle, you get your next measurement. If you improved substantially and met your goal, great work—from here on out, you just need to keep doing what you did. If you didn't improve or receded, treat your next iteration cycle even more seriously since your situation has gotten worse and you'll need to try something new to dig yourself out of the hole.
Do this for every class in every semester throughout high school. After you do it a few times it'll be second nature, and you'll do it without even thinking. As an analogy, this is how you keep your car on the road when driving your car. You get constant visual feedback on where you are on the road. If you veer to the left, you reflect on this and turn the steering wheel to the right. You do this constantly to stay on the road. When driving, you run constant iteration cycles to stay on the road.
When people first start learning to drive around age , they're not very accustomed to this feedback loop. They'll go nearly off the road before jerking the steering wheel back in the other direction.
Then, they realize they've gone too far and jerk it too far back. Practiced drivers make significantly smaller adjustments all the time. The next time your parents drive, watch them. You'll see them constantly make tiny adjustments left and right to stay exactly where they want to on the road. Experienced drivers do this automatically, by habit. In your academic life, you don't want to drive 60 mph off the road. Use feedback to figure out where you are and what adjustments you need to make if you're off track.
As a side note, here's a video of teens getting distracted by their phones and shooting way off the road:. I can't repeat this enough: this concept of iteration cycles is vital to your academic success. Many students don't go through this process because they don't realize they need to or don't feel like it's important enough compared to actual studying.
In contrast, I would say this is the most important thing you should do after a test. Between every test you probably spend 20 hours in school and 20 hours on homework.
Don't you think it's worth one hour examining your method and thinking about it if you're not doing well? We've covered a lot of high-level stuff so far. We've talked about the foundations of motivation and determination. We've discussed figuring out how teachers think and how to understand how you'll be tested. We've also covered good study habits and how to iterate on feedback to improve your results.
Now, let's talk about specific subjects, because how you'll treat calculus is very different from how you'll treat history. Math and science classes are typically the most straightforward classes because the material is very standardized. If you take AP Chemistry, the tests will most likely look like standard chemistry questions, and the labs will look like standard labs.
It's the same with calculus and physics—you have a ton of practice problems to work through in your textbook, online, and in supplementary books.
Unlike English-essay grading, teachers can't really get too creative or subjective here. The good news is that you can typically predict with great accuracy how you're doing well before a test. It's easy to prepare your own practice tests, review your mistakes, and understand where your weaknesses are and how you need to improve. The hard part about math and science is that the concepts build on each other throughout the year.
In short, something you learned earlier will directly affect your ability to grasp future concepts. In physics, for example, if you don't understand how force diagrams work, you'll struggle every step of the way through mechanics. In chemistry, if you don't understand stoichiometry and how to convert units to each other, every calculation will be difficult for you.
This doesn't apply as strongly in other subjects like history, which tends to be composed more of modular units. Even though I mentioned above that you can connect different concepts to build a strong network of knowledge, at the end of the day they don't build on each other as much. You might have flunked the section on the American Revolution, but this doesn't strongly affect how well you'll do on the Civil War section.
In my experience, math and science teachers don't emphasize this enough. They treat learning linearly, but in math and science it's really exponential. If you don't get it right in the beginning and don't fix it, you're screwed for the year because the teacher has already moved on.
So if you get a bad start to a math or science class, you need to double down and repair the holes immediately. If you don't, it'll only get worse. If you start a class way in over your head, consider dropping to a lower level. Another issue with math and science is that the material tends to be dry since it involves a lot of abstract topics that don't really affect your everyday life.
Good teachers will show you how the concepts apply to everyday life. If you're learning about EM waves in physics, for example, you'll also learn how your FM radio works. If you're learning about exponential functions, a teacher might take you through a simulation of compounded interest to show how much money you can make through savings.
I once heard a story about a physics teacher who was lecturing and tossed a ball at a student. The student caught it instinctively—didn't even have to think about it.
The teacher said, "What your brain just did is a kinematics calculation. You knew exactly where the ball started, how it was traveling, and where it would end up. That's exactly the point of what we're learning—to mathematically predict how traveling objects will behave.
If you lack inspiration in math and science, try to relate what you're learning to the real world and to what you care about. If you're a news junkie, this will help you understand articles and analyses more deeply. If you're an athlete, think about how physics works in your sport. This won't always work and can sound a bit hokey, but sometimes you might be pleasantly surprised.
In my experience the hardest part about English classes is the essay grading. Year by year, the standards you're graded on change, and the teacher's expectations change. Some teachers want you to follow the same formula essay after essay. Others want you to have a "voice" and write with style. I had a frustrating experience in Honors English when we had to write essays about themes of books we were reading. Most people would write something like "the theme is abandonment.
Eventually, we figured out that the theme statement was supposed to be a concept that required a sentence to explain, not just a single word. This requires you to dig a level deeper, something like "abandonment is crippling to a child's psyche and ripples throughout adulthood. In English classes, you have to understand the expectations of your teacher and how he will be grading essays.
As I said above, use every chance you have for reflection and iteration. If the teacher lets you submit drafts for review before the final essay, take this super seriously. Give the draft your best work, and if you're confused about any of the teacher's comments, ask about them outside of class.
If you don't do well on an essay, reflect on it, prepare notes, and approach the teacher and ask earnestly where your shortcomings are and how you can improve.
There are also solid foundations to effective writing, such as writing a clear thesis, using transitions between sections, employing textual evidence to support your points, and using appropriate and effective vocabulary. How to do this well is outside the scope of this article, but these are concepts you've been taught through much of English and can see every day in writing in publications such as The New York Times , The New Yorker , and The Atlantic.
Some classes rely more heavily on factual recall than others do. In particular, I'm thinking about history classes, for which you need to memorize historical events and figures, and foreign-language classes, for which you need to build up a wide vocabulary. Many students use flashcards for memorization, but they'll use them ineffectively. They'll just go through the entire stack from beginning to end and repeat.
This is ineffective because you end up spending the same amount of time reviewing words you already know as you do the words you have problems with.
What you need to do is bias your time toward the cards you actually struggle with. The way I do this is what I call the waterfall method of memorization. I describe this here in the context of memorizing vocab for the SAT. You cycle through the cards you don't know much more often than the cards you already know.
For long-term retention, there's also a concept known as spaced-repetition learning that spaces out your learning optimally to increase your recall of information. The idea is that right after you learn something, you should review it quickly thereafter to secure the memory.
The next time you review, it can be spaced out further, and the next one even further still. Doing this regularly will lock in knowledge in the long term. This is in contrast to the usual method of memorization, which is to cram before a test and then forget it until you need it for the final. Anki is a good tool that does this for you automatically.
Quizlet is another popular online flashcard tool where you can upload your own flashcards or use other people's flashcards. As I mentioned above, try to find connections between things you're learning, and look for patterns. Connect historical events to each other. See foreign-language grammar rules as fitting a pattern, and notice when rules deviate from that pattern.
This will make learning more interesting and help you understand concepts better. This isn't a specific class, but it's a common enough issue that it's worth discussing.
If you have a choice of partners, try to choose people who you know will do a good job. These are people who work hard and care about their grades. Friends might not be the best option if they're dead weight and you have to end up carrying them. Make it clear to the friend that it's not personal—you just don't feel you work well together.
If the friend ends up dissolving your friendship because she expects you to lift her up, and it's not because you're being a jerk about it, then the friendship probably wasn't that strong to begin with. If you don't get a choice of partners and the teacher just assigns you a group, you'll have to make do with what you have. Teachers are rarely sympathetic to complaints about your team, and it's unlikely you'll be able to change your partners.
If anything, be flattered if you get paired with weaker students—the teacher might believe you'll be a positive influence on them. Once your group is set, focus on getting a good job done. Treat it with the same care and planning as you would your own work, and don't be afraid to take charge if there hasn't been any action. Here are some tips for dealing with group projects:. Don't get hung up on inequality.
There's sometimes that one dude who is a complete flake and never gets his job done, and you end up having to cover his ass. Don't sweat it. Focus on the big picture: your grade. Redistribute his work to the rest of the team and revise the plan, and once again make sure the team agrees on the overall plan.
Yes, the slacker might end up with a good grade riding on your backs, but he's also probably screwed for his individual assignments and for other classes. Karma works its way.
0コメント