College Tip 4b: C's Get Degrees

College Tip 4b: C’s get degrees

School has been a part of your life for almost as long as you can remember. The objective in school is to bring home a report card full of A’s to parents to make them proud of how smart you are. Well, in college the concept is similar except you’re bringing your report card to potential employers and your grades are linked to how much money you’ll be making. Also, it’s reasonable to assume that straight A’s is a lot more to ask for in college than it was in high school. I’m sure you’ve heard the saying ‘ C’s get degrees’. Although this is true, I like to set higher expectations. I’m going to try and give you some tips on how to get B’s in your classes.

The first step is to analyze your classes. By this, I mean to figure out which ones are going to be the hardest and which ones are going to take a lot of time up. You should check all of the syllabi pretty carefully and look at the weight percentages of the different aspects of your classes such as homework, quizzes, labs, and exams.  Personally, I’ve found that homework can range between 5% and 30% of a grade. Exams are typically between 40% and 90%. Quizzes and labs can be anything or nothing. If you have a class in which homework is worth 30% of your grade, I highly recommend making sure you get 100% for that 30% by any means necessary. This will help you not only in that class but in others as well because you have room for error on your exams in that class and you have more time to study for exams for other classes. Now if homework is worth close to nothing and exams are a lot then it’s a different story.

By the middle of the ‘free time’ during the study week before finals that I referenced in my last video, you’ll want to have pinpointed the things you do and don’t know. This is another key to success. You’re going to find that no matter how hard you study there are things you just won’t get. You have to get over the fact that in high school you could memorize the entire U.S. history from 1800-2000 overnight, spit it out the next day in class, and come out of your test with an A. It doesn’t work that way in college. You have to figure out what you can learn. To learn something is much different than to memorize something. For example, the difference between my 300 level Anthropology class and my calc 3 class was that I actually had to learn in calc rather than memorize like I did in anthropology. I’ll get to this point later. Anyways when you figure out what you can learn you have to focus and make sure you get that stuff perfect. The rest you can touch on afterwards and hope that partial credit will save you. A lot of freshman exams are all multiple choice though because of the number of exams that have to be graded. These tests you should focus more on because you really need to know your shit if you want to not fail.

Back to the learning thing – you have to be prepared because learning something means understanding it. Working through practice problems and examples step by step is a very good way to accomplish this. However, when you’re having trouble you can’t be afraid to ask your professors or graduate assistants for help. There are also, almost guaranteed, tutors available or study tables that you should definitely not feel shy to take advantage of.

 
Anyways, I hope you have a decent understanding of how to breakdown and go at your classes!