How to take names and kick classes (Aka up your GPA)

I’m convinced that any student can get a high Grade Point Average in college given the right study strategies, self-motivation, and a little luck. Most students realize this later in college, in their third or fourth year when they finally figure the system and know how to study well. I've seen people (including myself) who are not the creme of the crop memorizers, writers, note takers or analyzers of information get very high GPAs. These people have simply found study strategies that worked and executed them consistently for every class. Here are some that I've found helpful. Skip the paragraph below if you are already in a university.

For high school students transitioning to college:

College work is far more independent than high school work. There’s less homework. There are less tests. And far more freedom. Yay! But this comes at a two-fold cost. 1. REALLY important midterms and finals. 2. Responsibility to know information that will not be tested for a while.
The best advice I can give to you is don’t ever get behind. Stay up with your reading, papers, and problem sets. Although you don’t need to learn and memorize everything in detail the first time, you should process everything as it comes so that when you review before a test, you are not seeing it for the first time. Not doing this will lead to hair pulling, all-nighter freak out moments that will make you a less efficient studier and possibly miss entire sections of information before the test.

One of the greatest difficulties in transitioning to college is setting your own schedule. You’ve just had 8 hours of class a day and been able to do most of your work and learning in class. Now all of a sudden you are going to class for only three hours a day and teachers expect you to learn three times more information outside of class. Therefore you have to figure out when you are going to study and then do it. It may help to use a calendar like “Google Calendar” or a daily planner to pencil in a few hours a day to studying.

General Tips for Dominating Classes

Determine what you do not understand:

Once you are able to consistently study and not get behind. You then need to figure out what it is that is keeping you from being a better studier. Many students hit a mental block before writing a paper, give up for the time being, and succumb to procrastination. Others (including myself at times) put off studying for a class for a few days because they don’t understand certain concepts and therefore find the subsequent information boring.

In order to resolve these difficulties, you need to figure out what it is that you do not understand and put that misunderstanding into a question for other classmates, professors, or TAs. Realizing what you don’t understand and then putting that into a question might be the most valuable study skill you learn. It’s certainly an underrated one. Next, don’t be shy about asking. Classes are set up so that you can email TAs. Professors have office hours, and classmates can often be an excellent source of information.

Utilize office hours far before tests:

As a Teaching Assistant for Metabolic Biochemistry and BILD 3, I received about 60% of my questions 24 hours before a test. There were certainly times when not a single student showed up to office hours because the test was not scheduled for two or three weeks from then. Occasionally, a student would come by with questions and we would work through them for an hour one on one. Because these hours were personalized and one-on-one, they were probably the most helpful learning tool for each student possible. Then, every office hour right before the test, around ten students would show up flustered and ready for quick answers. Unfortunately, I had to split my time 10 ways and their learning experiences were far inferior to that of students who had pinpointed their confusions weeks earlier and talked to me about them.

I’ve had this same experience being a student in classes. I received an A+ in Metabolic Biochemistry not because I got the information came easily to me, but because I worked out what questions I had as the information came. I attended office hours consistently with two TAs in different times in the week to resolve questions that arose, hone in on test important information, and to have them challenge me on my understanding of the material. In nearly all of these meetings, I received one-on-one attention except for the week before tests. Given the masses of students at these times, I decided it wasn’t worth attending right before lectures and I emailed TAs instead for those weeks.

-If you are writing a paper or working on a project that is more subjectively graded, office hours and TA/Professor communication is even more crucial. What you think is a good project idea or essay topic may not be in the eyes of your teacher. This is why clarification of what it is that your Professor specifically wants is key. Write up an early draft or project design and ask if your teacher can give you her opinion on it. They will often have critiques that you will need to respond to even if it’s against your opinion. When you eventually turn in your final assignment, the teacher will grade it knowing you worked hard and didn’t procrastinate. Plus, you are almost guaranteed that your final content will more in line with what he wanted.