Getting straight A’s won’t guarantee success, but it sure doesn’t hurt. A high GPA will help you make more money, pursue further education, or change career paths. If you’re going to spend many thousands of dollars on a college education, you might as well make the most of it. Right?
Being smart will help you get good grades, but it isn’t required. Neither is studying nonstop. The key to academic success is being disciplined and efficient in your study habits. These 7 strategies will help you raise your GPA while minimizing stress and overall study time.
1. Go to class - I know this one is mind-numbingly obvious but it’s important. Many professors lecture directly from PowerPoint and post the slides to the internet. This makes it tempting to skip class, download the lecture notes, and learn the material on your own. Although you can probably get away with this in easy courses, you’ll face problems in challenging ones. By skipping class, you miss out on a few important things:
- Detailed verbal explanations that are key to understanding the material
- The chance to ask questions and listen to the Q&A of other students
- Special announcements
- Opportunities for extra credit
It’s also important to consider how skipping class affects your reputation. In most classes, grades are somewhat subjective. This means that the grader’s perception of you can make or break your grade. If you frequently miss class, you’ll be perceived as someone who lacks respect for the professor and the subject matter. Why should they give you the benefit of the doubt or round that B+ up to an A-?
2. Sit in the front row - Not only will sitting in the front row build self confidence, it will automatically engage you in the lecture. You’ll appear to be an eager student and highly visible to the teacher. This will help your academic reputation and make it more likely you’ll develop a relationship with the professor. You’ll have a much easier time maintaining focus and will feel more like a participant than a passive observer.
3. Take notes by hand - Another unfortunate side effect of the PowerPoint revolution is that it discourages students from taking notes. Taking notes by hand will improve your grades because a) it forces you to pay attention, and b) the physical act of writing aids memorization. If you take notes, you’ll find it much easier to stay engaged. Your notes also provide a point of reference that will help you build a mental link between a written concept and the professor’s verbal explanation. This is key for efficient studying.
4. Do a weekly review - A common problem students encounter is trying to learn an enormous amount of material right before the midterm or final exam. This is practically impossible. You’ll find it much easier if you take a gradual approach to studying. At least once a week, review your notes starting from the beginning of the course. This only needs to take 15 or 20 minutes, just enough time to build familiarity with the material.
By doing a weekly review you’ll gradually memorize everything and will better understand how one concept builds on the next. Putting in small amounts of effort on a consistent basis will drastically reduce the amount of studying you need to do right before the test.
5. Go to office hours - Professors and TA’s usually make themselves available at regular times during the week for students to ask questions about assignments. Do yourself a favor by taking advantage of this opportunity. First, attending office hours will motivate you to get ahead on your work and prepare questions to ask. This will give you a huge edge in understanding problems that aren’t clearly explained in the lectures. Second, it will build your reputation as a high-effort student who deserves high grades.
6. Find smart people to work with - In courses that involve group work, this is essential. No one wants to get stuck with a bunch slackers, have to do all the work themselves, and end up with a poor grade to show for it. The quality of the your learning experience is directly related to the attitudes of the people you work with. Working with smart people will facilitate discussion. The best way to understand an idea is talking about it with other intelligent people.
Who you work with also affects your academic reputation. If you associate with students that aren’t interested in learning, teachers and graders will assume you feel the same way. It’s also a great way to connect with people who have similar interests and ambitions.
7. Avoid all-nighters - Generally, having to pull an all-nighter means that you slacked off all semester and need to fit 3 months of learning into one day. If you use a gradual study strategy this will never be necessary. All-nighters don’t work! Yes, it might be possible to get a good grade if the course is easy, but it’s much more likely that your grade will be significantly lower. All-nighters harm performance because they make you tired and stressed. You’ll also forget most of what you learn right after the test, decreasing the practical value of your education.
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Rather than reviewing once a week, I try to glance over my notes the day it’s taken - that’s extremely important, because scientific studies show that the mind retains only 50% of what it takes in after 48 hours (without revision, that is). Now imagine what happens in a week. Ouch.
Besides, review is such an intimidating, formal word. Say glance. Glance over your notes every night, folks! Even if you just scan it with your eyes for a minute, it helps!
Another “7 ways…”,”8 move…”,”7 tips…”,”24 easy…”,”5 steps…” ….
Here is another tip. Wear glasses. It seems to have worked for me. In college, I always hovered around the B+ A- range until I bought a pair of cheap glasses and wore them during classes. My theory is that the glasses made me look smarter (perhaps made me feel smarter too) and so the professors gave me the benefit of the doubt more often and so I pretty much got all straight A’s my junior and senior year. Glasses won’t bring a person from a C to an A, but they could provide the extra edge to go from A- to A+.
Participation in class discussion is also very useful. Not all classes are interactive, but the ones that are you should participate. And the easiest way to have the confidence to participate is to do all the reading assignments.
“Second, it will build your reputation as a high-effort student who deserves high grades.”
You should not be graded on effort. You do not *deserve* better grades because you are “high-effort”. You deserve the grade you earned based on the syllabus you are introduced to on (likely) the first day of class. If an instructor grades on effort, bully for you. But it’s not common.
Just because you work hard does not mean you are learning or absorbing the material. This notion is becoming more pervasive all the time and contributing to the “Age of Entitlement”, and it’s causing a lot of college students a lot of grief.
A few more to add to the list…
9) Do the reading assignments
10) Study for the tests
11) Don’t stay out until 3 AM drinking the night before class
Sure, these are as mind-numbingly obvious as “go to class,” but hey, if you’ve ever been a college student you know most people don’t do these things.
- Paul
Participate in class and never forget to do homework. It’s a big part of your grade and doesn’t take much effort. One thing I learned last year is never try to have a general binder for all classes, it will get filled up very fast.
Thanks for the tips! While “going to class” seems like an obvious thing, i’m astounded by how many people walk in the door, drop off their homework, and leave.
I too have been taking a look at my notes in the evenings, the same day that I took them in class, but I never considered doing a weekly review. That’s a great idea, and starting from the beginning every time will keep the old stuff fresh.
I’m a CS student and therefore an advocate of the advancement of technology in this world, but I draw the line when it comes to note taking. I think that those kids who sit in lectures and simply retype what they see in the presentation aren’t getting anything out of it aside from the muscle memory of being able to type without looking.
I have a CS lecture that’s exactly like this, and instead of taking notes on my laptop or even on paper (which makes for a horrible wrist cramp), I print off the professor’s slides at the beginning of each week. Then, during the lecture, I use a highlighter to mark the most important parts, and write other comments in the margins in pencil. This allows me to have a full set of notes, but still pay complete attention to the professor at the same time!
You make some good points, Sam. Highlighting is actually a great substitute for hand written notes. It’s what I use in my CFA studying.
Try taking notes with the online app http://notesake.com you can tag your notes for easier searching and studying later on. Also NoteSake accepts both LaTeX and Textile markup languages. If you do miss a class another NoteSake user can save you by passing you their note, or as a group you can collaborate on the same note.
A great tip is to eat a case of mints before class. Mints stimulate the blood flow, which stimulates the mind flow, which stimulates the grade flow.
get a classmates phone number, so if you do miss class-you can call them up and copy their notes down
Interesting. I never knew that about mints. Maybe I’ll try eating some when I get tired at work…
Another tip, not reading articles like this one while in lecture… :p
I would say these are pretty standard tactics for keeping your grades up…
For just about anything you want to learn, there is a certain amount of stuff you just have to memorize. For that, look into spaced repetition. Software makes it easy, but you can also do it by hand.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_repetition
http://www.digitaldominion.com/products/tyb/overview.aspx
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This applies more to people in Scientific and Engineering courses of study. Never try to finish an entire problem set in one sitting. If you adopt this, you are forced to space out your work and start on the problem set earlier. This in turn allows you to benefit from a professor’s office hours because you can go to them with any questions you have about the problems. The earlier you start on a problem set, the more time you give yourself when you run into a road block. Personally, I also found that it’s better to work on multiple problem sets in parallel as opposed to serially. Meaning, if you have 4 problems sets, work on 1/4 of each one for four days as opposed to working on 1 entire set each day.
[…] saw a good article over at pickthebrain.com about how to increase your GPA. Some of these stuff seems like common sense, but they are worth […]
personally i like to study with dumb people - the ones who fall behind not because they choose to, but because they just can’t keep up with the material. these people are likely to be very receptive to a fellow student who wants to help them out - as we all know, you retain much more information by teaching. furthermore, by forcing yourself to reword descriptions in simpler terms can really help you understand concepts at their very core, which makes it much easier to form connections to other material taught in the course.
find a study group of people who are way below your level, and by effectively teaching them, you’ll have raised your own level significantly.
S-Q-R-R-R
When reading material for a class follow this:
Survey - Quickly scan the material, look for the main points
Question - Ask yourself questions about what you surveyed
Read - Now read the material
Review - Review what you have read. Can you answer the questions that you asked above?
The last ‘R” is Re-read. Do this a day before an exam on the material
Once last tip. Read the material before the class covering the material. Then in class you can concentrate on the areas you did not understand when you read it and can ask questions.
I agree with Jin.
Helping others below your level forces you to re-learn from their point of view, going back to the basics. It is a form of review, where you simplify what you learned so that others can understand. As a side-effect, you make new friends and build relationships.
The attitude of “we know we’re not the brightest, but can get through this together” provides support and confidence, boosting morale for big exam.
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[…] Written by John Wesley […]
[…] Written by John Wesley […]
Thank you very much for the tips.
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Here’s another GPA-raising tip:
Look around you, if you see too many smart/pedantic/overachieving people in the class — drop the class and take it another time. You are not graded on an absolute scale, you’re graded relative to your classmates.
And I also agree with some of the others above: obsessively taking notes keeps your attention from the subject matter. Unless you’re in graduate school, anything the professor puts up on the board can be found in the book. You can make note of the topics the professor is presenting but, simply copying them down like a Xerox does not do much for me, and probably many others who haven’t yet tried to simply listen to the lecture. And, if you’re so inclined, purchase a $60 digital recorder and let it do the copying for you.
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One tip which has helped me a lot is taking notes on whatever the professor says and writes on the board, just keywords, diagrams and stuff like that .
I throw it away after the class, but in some strange way the act of taking notes on a paper has helped me a lot.
Another tip:
If you can help it, don’t work while you are a full time student. When employers expect 20 hours a week out of you in addition to your academics, things get very stressful and both subjects suffer.
The problem is, of course, amplified around midterms and finals week. If you do have to work, make sure your employer is flexible with hours around these times. Academics come first!
Reading the notes weekly is a very good idea - but take it a step further. For many classes the reading assignments augment the lectures or vice versa. As a History/Poli Sci dual major I’d underline passages and write margin notes as I read. Every Saturday I reviewed my lecture notes, margin notes, and underlined passages and then created a new set of notes.
Interestingly, I discovered in the middle of my sophomore year that having creating these merged notes I actually never had to study for exams! Merging notes helped me to synthesize the material and absorb it well enough to stay on the Dean’s List throughout my college career.
On another note: I agree that one shouldn’t be graded on effort or on merely showing up to class. Still, when a professor reads a marginal paper/exam by a student he knows and another from a student he cannot put a face to, the student he knows is much more likely to get get benefit of the doubt.
“6. Find smart people to work with - In courses that involve group work, this is essential. No one wants to get stuck with a bunch slackers, have to do all the work themselves, and end up with a poor grade to show for it.”
Especially not the smart people themselves.
The biggest stoner I know completed a masters degree and is working on a doctorate, in education naturally. For god’s sake, he gets stoned before going to lift weights. His strategy for success closely tracks yours; go to every class, sit in the front, always contribute, tell the instructor what they want to hear. That’s it.
I do not agree. This strikes me as a passive, brown nosing approach to learning. I think a University student should be more independent.
BTW I got my university degree in political science in Paris, and a long time ago.
1) I only attended lectures when I felt like it.
2) I never sat in the front row, irrelevant.
3) I took some notes, but more important, I read a lot on the subject, and tried to enjoy the lecture.
4) I never had the discipline to do a weekly review.
5) Never went to see a prof unless I had a real issue or question.
6) Who you work with is usually random. It is better to get used to different kinds of people.
7) All nighters? Not a good idea but you do what you have to do.
My advice. Become an independent learner. It is your knowledge, your head, your degree. Read on your own. Read and re-read.
Think about what you are learning. And today, use the Internet. Especially find podcasts, or recorded lectures and listen to them more than once while jogging and doing other things.
When you have an assignment, do the research. That is when you can really review what you have been learning.
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good list. looking back on my undergrad years, i personally believe that tips 5&6 should be rated more importantly than tips 3&4
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these hints are only helpful in reminding us what to me should be obvious if in fact a student actually wants to progress in school. I think there should be more help in the activities out of school to have these helpful hints stay constant through out the course.
10 GPA boosting tips and then some…
Russ Egan over at The Student Help Forum has compiled a list of 10 tips to help boost your GPA (7 of them are from Pick the Brain’s John Wesley, who I will also credit). What are few things I took note of? The idea of doing a weekly review to further….
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How to raise your GPA: get better grades.
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