Study Hacks

Manila-Flavored Advice

I recently did an interview with the Manila Bulletin, in which I discussed the basic ideas underpinning the Straight-A Method (the framework for all of my studying advice). I thought it might be a good idea to reproduce some of the article here as a way to bring my newer readers up to speed on the type of good old fashioned study tips found in my books.

(The full article can be found here.)

STUDENTS AND CAMPUSES BULLETIN (SCB): What are some of the common causes of “underachievement” in school?

Cal Newport (CN): Student culture. It’s seen as uncool to be working hard. Also, there is often a fear that if you admit to working hard then do poorly then this somehow proves that you’re not smart. A lot of talented students develop terrible habits as a way of avoiding this fear. My advice to overcome this culture is “keep it yourself.” Study how much you need to study and don’t make it a topic of conversation.

SCB: How important is motivating yourself to study?

CN: The worse your study habits, the worse your urge to procrastinate – your mind tries to avoid activities that seem painful for no good reason. If you’re on top of your work, follow a reasonable schedule, and use efficient habits, it’s a lot easier to stay motivated.

SCB: What strategies can a student use in each stage of his school life?

CN: In grade school, get used to the habit of setting aside a little block of time each day – maybe right after school – during which you complete your homework.

In high school, overcome the cram habit by keeping a detailed deadline calendar and devising a study plan for papers and major tests; i.e., how you are going to study, for how long, and on what days. This is also a good time to expand your grade school habit and maintain set times, each day, in which the bulk of your work gets done. Finally, and I can’t stress this enough: never, ever do school work on a computer that is connected to the Internet. This is a complete waste of time. Finish the paper early, then you can dedicate your entire night – if you so wish – to facebook.

In college, always attend class. Spread out your assignments over the week (don’t leave them until the night before; this isn’t high school, the work load can’t be crammed into a few hours of intense effort). Study during pockets of free time in the morning and afternoon; definitely don’t leave everything until after dinner. Ignore how your friends study – they’re probably idiots when it comes to these skills – and, instead, run your own experiments to discover what techniques seem to be the most efficient for you. Top students often have crazy tool boxes of custom-built study systems that help them get work done fast.

In graduate school, the culture is more dangerous then the work load. Ignore how much you are “supposed” to be working and focus, during the early years, on getting the work done well. Later, when faced with a dissertation, avoid the “woe is me” attitude, and just get started early, and work consistently over time, with plenty of feedback, to develop something good.

SCB: How can a student be motivated to get good grades even though a boring subject or a teacher gets in the way of an exciting learning situation?

CN: Studying is like a game. You are faced with a source of information, you have to do some sort of processing, at the other end you take a test or write a paper and get a grade for it.

The challenge is to make that middle part – the processing – as efficient and effective as possible. Even if you don’t love the subject, there is always something fulfilling about watching your custom-built note-taking and review system suck in the info, process it, review it, and spit out top-scoring results on the other end.

SCB: What are the top five skills students must learn in order to get high grades in class?

CN: Pay attention in class. Capture big ideas in your notes, not a transcript of every word the teacher uttered.

Energy and focus is more important than time when it comes to studying. Work in focused chunks in the morning and the afternoon – not in long stretches after dinner.

Always have a plan. There is nothing worse than heading off to the library with vague ambitions to “study.” Always be specific about what actual work you are planning on doing and how long it should take.

Avoid rote review. Silently reading and re-reading over notes is a slow way to learn. Instead, try to recall big ideas, out loud, as if lecturing to a class.

Start working much earlier than your classmates. Work in smaller chunks spread out over more time. The results are better and the pain much less.

SCB: What can you advise students who are currently having a hard time in school?

CN: Last fall I wrote a blog article called “The Vital 5” which listed the following five steps for turning around poor academic performance:

1. Attend every class. Take notes on a laptop.

2. Set aside a fixed two-hour study block for every weekday and Sunday. Use this time to study, in a remote corner of the library, without exception, every week of the term.

3. Make a study plan for every test in every class at the beginning of the term. Decide what you are going to do and when.

4. Replace rote review with quiz and recall.

5. Attend office hours every single week to discuss the most challenging material from lecture, or the hardest problems from the problem set. Inform the professor that you are making a real effort this term to turn around your performance.

(photo by permanently scatterbrained)

E-mail Anonymous

Some students have no trouble with e-mail. Others, however, find themselves constantly checking their inbox — in class, while reading, while studying — making it hard to concentrate. This article is for the latter group.

The modern information consumer knows that the most efficient way to handle e-mail is to check your inbox just a few times a day and always process it back down to empty. For a lot of us, however, this is easier said than done. It’s just so damn tempting to take a quick peek; a glance to see if something cool has slipped in over the past few minutes.

In this article I’ll describe a simple but devastatingly effective hack for curbing this bad habit.

Eliminate the Difference Between Read and Unread

The hack works as follows:

• Setup a filter that automatically marks every incoming message as read.

(In Gmail you can accomplish this by creating a filter with a wildcard — * — in the “From” field, then selecting “Mark as Read” as the action to apply.)

This hack eliminates the difference between read and unread messages — no more bold message titles or increasing inbox counts to titillate your senses. It makes your inbox monotypic — a term I’ve stolen from botany to capture the idea that your inbox now contains only one “species” of message.

The Power of a Monotypic Inbox

If you apply this hack, here is what will happen: At first, you’ll maintain your old habits, taking frequent quick peeks to see if anything interesting has arrived. As usual, this breaks your concentration and makes it hard to make serious progress on the studying or paper writing or reading before you. As you continue to take quick e-mail breaks, however, the number of messages in your inbox grows; and they are all marked as read.

Once your inbox gains a few dozen messages, things start to get annoying. You can’t easily remember which messages you’ve already glanced at and which are unread. You find yourself re-reading some messages and missing others.

Eventually, you get fed up and clean out your inbox. To avoid this pain again you stop checking your e-mail so frequently; making sure to now always leave yourself enough time to process it back down to empty so you won’t confuse new messages with old.

This of course is exactly the behavior we hoped to achieve. It’s a rough tactic, I’ll admit it. For most people it’s unnecessary. However, if you’re someone for whom frequent e-mail checks is scuttling your ability to concentrate, then it might be time to pull out the big guns. The monotypic inbox might be crude, but it works.

(Photo by dampeebe)

Academic Hell

I recently met a student whom I’ll call Amy. She’s a rising junior in the pre-med honors program at a top state university. After a strong freshman year, Amy kicked off her first semester as a sophomore with a schedule bearing four “very difficult” courses.

“As soon as the semester started, I sensed that this schedule would not work,” she recalls. “But for some reason, I kept all of it, thinking: ‘Hey, I’m smart, I can make it through this.’”

“Big Mistake!”

“I found myself learning exam material, for the first time, three days before the test and living day to day, always fearing what was to come…it was academic hell!”

When the grades were returned, Amy was not happy. To make things worse, she was drained. As she explains, by the end of the semester, she had begun to “loathe” her classes; a source of devastating deep procrastination.

The Turnaround

The following semester, which ended this past June, was a different story. Amy scored much higher grades. Her performance in the undergraduate research lab where she worked improved significantly, earning her the honor of a solo project — something that will play a big role in her med school applications. And she no longer loathed her classes.

What changed? Something simple. Something that no employer, professional school or graduate school would ever notice. But still something that made all the difference in the world for this one student. It’s a stress reduction technique that is tragically ignored by too many students.

In this article, I give it the attention it deserves…

The Biggest Avoidable Source of Student Stress

Between the first and second semester of her sophomore year, Amy changed her course load. She went from four very difficult courses to a much more reasonable 14 credit hours. She was also careful about the balance of courses. She had only one lab course, and selected the others to fall between 9 and 12, leaving her afternoons free to study.

“I felt like something was wrong; like I shouldn’t have this much free time,” recalls Amy. “With fewer classes, however, I could actually focus during my study time and make progress.”

Here’s the important point: Though this change drastically improved Amy’s life, the medical schools to which she plans on applying won’t even notice. In other words, the “academic hell” Amy suffered through during her first sophomore semester was entirely unnecessary.

The Hardcore Myth

Many students believe that taking a punishing course load will somehow indicate a higher ability; making it easier to land jobs or post-graduate positions. Here’s the reality: it won’t.

Employers and professional schools will notice your GPA, where you went to school, and your major. They don’t care about about how many credit hours you jammed into each semester or how hard your schedule was compared to others in the same major. The same goes for graduate schools. Though it’s true that specific professors on the admissions committee might look at your grades in the classes relevant to their specialty, they don’t care about the general hardness of your particular schedule.

The implication: once you’ve chosen your major, it’s in your best interest to construct the most reasonable, balanced, low-stress course load possible. Jamming in an unnecessary number of heart-attack courses serves no purpose other than to make your life hell. It won’t make you more impressive to the outside world.

Some practical advice for using your schedule to dramatically reduce your stress:

1. Don’t double major. Even if you “like” both majors. Even if you think that the particular job or graduate program you’re interested in demands both. (They don’t.) Neither are good reasons. A double major will force you to have hard semesters and offers little extra reward in return.
2. Select your major early. A big source of terrible semester are students who decide, late in their academic career, to tack on a new major or change their major — requiring a large number of hard pre-reqs to be knocked off in a short amount of time. Your major is less important than you think. Settle on something sophomore year and stick with it.
3. Make a long-term course schedule. Don’t live semester by semester with your course planning. Instead, map out what courses you need for your college’s core requirements and your major’s requirements, and then make a long-term schedule to avoid pile-ups.

If I was only allowed to offer you one piece of advice to make your college years easier, it might be this simple rule. Nothing seems to have as profound an effect on student stress than a killer course load (though a killer extracurricular load runs a close second). What pains me is that this stress is so unnecessary. Get the credit hours required to graduate. Take the courses required for your major. That’s all that matters. Don’t make you life much more difficult than it needs to be.

As Amy says: “I realized that the pseudo-life I had been living that past semester was something I never wanted to do again.”

You should consider making a similar pledge.

(Photo by Joe Lanman)

Bad Problem, Worse Metaphor

Are you a procrastinator? Not necessarily a psychologically-scarred, can’t start work if your life depended on it because you resent your major and are crushed by the weight of your parent’s expectations-style deep procratinator, but instead someone who tends to wait just a little bit too long to get started on big assignments? The type that ends up getting your ass kicked by built-up work at the end of every term?

Many students are in your same boat.

Today, I want to give you a simple rule that will turn your academic rudder and point this boat back towards shore. Where the shore, in this instance, represents the promised land of not procrastinating, and my introduction represents how to construct a terrible, strained metaphor.

A Common Scenario

Here’s the scenario. It’s October 5th, the semester is young, you’re in your art history class marveling at how much better dressed everyone in the room is than you (something about art history students always make me feel, by comparison, like I was dressed by a rabid pack of color-blind monkeys). The professor hands out a sheet describing your big scary original research paper due at the end of the semester.

Your instinct is to immediately lose the sheet and then forget about the big scary original research paper until a few weeks before it’s due. At this point you’ll start diligently adding it to the very top of your to-do list, perhaps accented by several stars for emphasis, and then promptly do nothing. Finally, with a week to go, panic kicks in and you’ll dash together the type of sloppy of paper that makes professors sigh loudly then reach for that bottle hidden in their bottom desk drawer.

I want you to resist this urge. I want you to instead do do something so stunning, so unexpected, that it may take a moment for you to regain your senses: I want you to get started on the assignment the same day it’s assigned.

Allow me to explain…

The Same Day Rule

This rule is one of the most effective procrastination defusers I’ve yet to encounter. It’s formalized as follows:

For every medium to large size assignment, do some work toward its completion the same day that it’s assigned.

It should be serious work; at least a half-hour. But it certainly doesn’t have to eat up your whole evening. The logic here is simple. Big assignments scare us so we resist starting. As we all know, once you get started, the scariness diminishes and it’s easier to make progress. The same day rule takes advantage of this reality and pushes it to its extreme.

A few implementation tips:

• You can adjust the rule to require that you get started within a week. For example, I used to leave my Saturdays free from regular work like reading assignments and problem sets. When given a major project, I would, at first, use some time on Saturday to start making progress. There was something nice about it being the only task for the day (other than killing a hangover.)
• The best first steps involve planning. You can’t, of course, start writing a research paper the day its assigned. You can, however, gather some books or sketch out the type of sources you need to make progress.
• The best first steps end with the identification of the second step. If you want to reap the full benefit of this rule, make sure you end your first small piece of work having clearly identified the next small piece of work. At this point, the big scary project has been reduced to a tiny little next action that you’re happy to act upon.

Conclusion

It’s a simple piece of advice. But one I still use. Not only does it take away the fear of large assignments, but there’s something about starting so early that gives you a little jolt of self-satisfaction. Like some sort of academic junkie, you’ll begin to crave this jolt, and might just find yourself cured of your procrastination habit altogether. At very least, your shiny ‘A’ might impress all those well-dressed bastards who think they’re so much cooler than you.

(Photo by xb3)

Restarting is Hard to Do

Something that surprised me last fall, when I began to work more closely with individual students on productivity issues, was the difficulty of transitioning from chaos to control. It’s one thing to learn the type of systems used by the most efficient students, it’s quite another thing, however, to put these systems into practice. More often than not, my experience has been: the more productivity habits you start at the same time the higher the probability that you’ll abandon them all. It just becomes too overwhelming.

In this post, I want to talk about getting started from scratch. How to ease into that transition from a chaotic student lifestyle to relaxed efficiency; making changes that will stick…

Getting Started on the Road to Efficiency

Below I have described five small habits. If you’re new to student productivity, I would recommend that you stick to these five, and only these five, until at least midterms of the first semester in which you deploy them. If all goes fine, then you can consider adding some of the more advanced techniques discussed on this blog and elsewhere. (For a good example, read this article, which describes the collection of systems and habits I use regularly as a student).

From my experience, these changes are easy enough — and have a big enough positive impact — that they shouldn’t overwhelm your self-discipline. Once you get used to having some control you’ll be able to start moving toward mastery. Remember: start small. Keep improving…

1. Setup a Google Calendar.
   Keep your appointments, classes, office hours, meetings, and deadlines on Google calendar. The advantage of a web-based calendar, of course, is that you can check it from any computer on campus. The specific advantage of Google’s offering is the quick add feature, which lets you quickly type in new appointments in natural language (i.e., “midterm next Thursday” or “econ group meeting Friday from 1 to 3″). This is easy enough that you’ll actually probably keep the calendar up to speed. Especially if you use the browser plug-in version of the feature; keeping calendar updates just a few keystrokes away.
2. Choose your courses carefully.
   For your first term as a new and improved student, you need to avoid a killer schedule. Mix class types. Don’t have too many science courses or too many writing-heavy courses scheduled all at once. Don’t be afraid to schedule in a course that seems interesting but may have a reputation as being, well, not too hard. You need to practice having control over your workload, and this means starting with a load that’s easier to control.
3. Take an activity vacation.
   This piece of advice, first spelled out in this article, is tough for some to stomach. But I recommend it highly. Take a break from your extracurriculars. As I mentioned in the original article, this is college, not the Olympics, no one is going to fault you if you say “I need to take a semester break to refocus on my grades.” Your various club memberships and volunteer gigs will be waiting for you when you return. As with the last piece of advice, you need breathing room to start getting comfortable with being an efficient, organized student. Killing your activities — for just a semester — gives you the space needed to get comfortable with being in control.
4. Insist on a study plan for every problem set, test, and paper.
   When you’re first starting your student overhaul, it’s overwhelming to deploy too many complicated study rules; especially if they all demand stringent behavior controls. You need some flexibility in the earlier stages; some time to help you get used to having a plan and discovering what type of things work best for you. To accommodate this reality, follow this simple advice: have some plan for everything major assignment. For now, I don’t care what the plan says. Just have something, decided in advanced. that spells out, roughly, how you are going to complete the assignment (i.e., what specific actions…you’re not allowed to used ambiguous terms like “study”), and how you’re going to break up the work.
5. Establish a Sunday Ritual.
   I covered this advice in both a previous post and in How to Win at College. There’s a reason it keeps coming up: it’s simple yet yields tremendous results. The basic idea of the ritual is to transition from the debauchery of Friday and Saturday into the new workweek. I recommend it consists of the following: (1) eat a big breakfast, read something interesting, drink (lots) of coffee, and clear your head; (2) get your calendar and task lists up to speed, integrate in the loose stuff that gathered in the week; (3) go to the most deserted library on campus, and spend the rest of the morning and early afternoon working; and (4) conclude by setting up a schedule for Monday. You can vary this as you see fit, so long as you retain the basic structure of clearing your head, fleeing civilization, and getting stuff done.

Baby Steps

These initial changes omit most of the super-detailed strategy we love to dissect here on Study Hacks. Notice, there is no complicated time management system or advanced scheduling tactics or complicated note-taking formats. These are all tools that will eventually enter your student arsenal. But if you’re new to efficiency, resist their allure for now. Get used to having a basic plan, and knowing your schedule, and clearing your head on weekends. Do this during a semester with a light course load and no activities. Experience the rush of being in control of your obligations. Once you’ve scored that high, you’ll never want to lose it again.

Then you can move on to the fun stuff…

(Photo courtesy of the contented)

The Student’s Curse

After spending years confronting the peculiar peccadilloes of the student set, I’ve learned that one problem, in particular, looms above the rest. I’m talking, of course, about procrastination. For many students, it’s the personification of academic troubles: “if I could only stop procrastinating on my work, I would be doing fine.”

My experience has revealed that there are two types of procrastination. The first, which I’ll call light procrastination, is the standard resistance to shutting down e-mail or turning off the TV that we all feel. I’ve posted before on hacking this issue; simple tricks, like working according to a regular schedule, starting early rather than late, and keeping yourself well-fed.

The real monster, however, is what I call deep procrastination. This is a state, reached by an alarming number of students, in which the pressure of starting at the absolute last minute becomes necessary to motivate any work. Students who suffer from deep procrastination pull frequent all-nighters and are often found begging for extensions on assignments they couldn’t bring themselves to begin before the deadline.

This is a serious problem, and I want to offer an unconventional solution — born from experience — for eliminating its worse effects.

The Roots of Deep Procrastination

The most common reason given for procrastination: work sucks. You assume you delay because the chore itself is brutal. But is this true?

Think back to the last assignment that you put off until the minute. Now imagine during the upcoming fall semester you have no courses to take. Your professor says he believes in your talent and that he wants you to complete this one assignment at your own pace.

For most students, the work would be rather enjoyable. Be it a research paper or a big chunk of reading, there is something very satisfying about mastering material over time. It makes you feel competent (one of our three basic psychological needs), and most people, when not under incredible pressure, actually enjoy learning new things.

The reason, then, that some students suffer from deep procrastination: their schedule as a whole is too demanding. Put simply, there is too much work and not enough time. Night after night they forced into a situation where they have to work, probably late, and this sucks. After a while a resentment grows toward their schoolwork — it is making their life miserable. And once they resent the work — and get none of the joys of competency and learning and mastery that classes could provide — their mind starts doing whatever it can to avoid getting started.

Curing Deep Procrastination

So what works? Stricter schedules and more intense productivity rules won’t cut it. The problem is not disorganization, it is, instead, a deep-seated antipathy to student work in general. If you want to cure deep procrastination you have to remove the source of resentment. And this means doing less; much less.

Student’s who shift to schedules with much more free time find themselves handling their workload without pain. Without the pain, they don’t grow to resent their schedules. And without the resentment, no deep procrastination will arise.

This is somewhat unexpected, as making your schedule lighter makes it easier to procrastinate in the sense that you can get away with more last minute heroics. However, for most students, the opposite occurs. The light schedule takes away their fatigue, and a true interest in their work blossoms again. Guess what? When you’re interested in your work, it’s not that hard to get started…sometimes even real early.

Are You a Deep Procrastinator?

If your procrastination has gotten to the point where your grades are starting to suffer, or you’re frequently working into the twilight hours to make deadlines at the last minute, seriously consider why this is happening, then ask yourself what you might gain by rebuilding a happy relationship with your schoolwork.

Here are a few past articles to help you get started:

• The Zen Valedictorian
  Take a look at law #1 (underschedule) for a discussion of how and why to keep your schedule light.
• The Radical Simplicity Manifesto
  No-nonsense advice for achieving an underscheduled lifestyle. It’s based on the Rule of One: one major, one course load, and one extracurricular.
• How to Be Happy
  If you understand the science behind your happiness, you’ll be more likely to take you course load seriously.

The SAT Season Looms

Over the past two weeks I’ve received three different e-mails asking for advice about SAT prep. I assume, therefore, that we’ve entered a season during which many high school students have begun to look ahead to this most dreaded of the standardized test family.

In this post, I want to summarize the system I typically recommend for high-performance SAT preparation. This advice is motivated by three sources: (1) my own experience preparing for the SAT (which I took only once and did pretty well on); (2) the results of a survey I conducted last fall about test prep habits that worked; and (3) observations I made about how a group of my college friends prepared for the LSATs (all three got into Harvard Law School, so they must have done something right.)

The Practice Test Tsunami

My system for SAT preparation works as follows:

1. Skim the Princeton Review Book. I find some of its advice to be simplistic (for example, all that nonsense about Joe Bloggs), but it also offers some concrete strategies for tackling the main question types. In particular, their methods for dealing with ratio problems on the math section, and analogies on the verbal section, are fast and work well. Learn these. They make a difference.
2. During a 5 - 10 week period leading up to the test, take 2 timed practice tests per week. Do one of the tests in one sitting (with breaks calibrated to match the real SAT.) I recommend setting aside a weekend morning each week for this beast. I also recommend the public library as a better location than your noisy house. The other timed test you can be split up. For example, tackle a timed math section one day and a timed verbal section another. Spread these out. If you attempt too much review, you’ll burn out and stop working all together. Similarly, if you don’t take the timed test seriously — and really concentrate — they don’t help nearly as much. So set aside serious time for serious concentration.
3. Go back and review every single wrong answer. Taking the timed tests will get you used to working under pressure. To further improve your performance, however, it’s crucial that after each timed session you review every single question you got wrong; determine why you got it wrong and why the right answer is right. This post-mortem is by the far the most effective tactic for improving your ability to consistently nail the harder questions.
   (Bonus Tip: A reader wrote me this morning to reveal a twist to the wrong question review process. She recorded her wrong answers on note cards, and then did a quiz-and-recall review. As she took more practice tests, her pile of hard question note cards increased. Each day, she did a fresh Q-and-R on her trouble spots. The result? She claims that it quickly revealed patterns that immediately improved her performance. Her math score — where she was having the most trouble — bounced up 150 points in one week!)

If you find this workload too brutal, start earlier and spread it out more. For example, there would be nothing wrong with starting review now for the October test date. You can do only one timed test per week, and take some weeks off. Don’t make the mistake of equating pain with quality review. The two are unrelated.

But What About…

A few final notes. In my (unverified) opinion, this technique works better than the Princeton Review prep courses. The students who benefit from the prep courses do so because it forces them to take timed sample tests. If you can do practice tests on your own (and follow-through on the resulting post-mortems), you won’t gain anything new from the formal courses.

Second, I’m not a huge believer in memorizing vocabulary lists. The only way to hit the 700 range or above on the verbal section is to read, a lot. If you’re younger, start reading as much real books as possible. (Like many high-scorers on the verbal section I begun reading adult fiction and non-fiction early.) Memorizing words might boost a not high score to slightly less not high, so if that’s you, then, I guess, you can memorize if you want. On the other hand, if you’re a bookworm, you’ll probably find that with practice your scores get where you need them to be without memorization.

Whatever you do, however, don’t buy those stupid fake novels with SAT prep words bolded. They’re a waste of print and an insult to anyone planning on attending college. If you’re in doubt, drop me a line, I’m happy to recommend any number of real books that will boost your vocabulary while having the advantage of not being terrible.

What worked for you? 

“The following are valid excuses for skipping class: I have a fever of 105 degrees; I need to fly to L.A. to accept an Academy Award; today in class we are reviewing a book I wrote; my leg is caught in a bear trap. The moral of this exercise: Always go to class!“

– from How to Win at College

Debatable Attendance

A lively discussion has broken out in the comments thread of last Friday’s post. The topic: whether it’s necessary to attend class. On one side of the debate is the idea that some professors don’t offer any new information in lecture, ergo: you can skip these classes. The other side of the debate says that there’s more to lecture than just raw information. The professor, for example, might indicate which material is most important for an upcoming test. As a more straightforward concern, it’s also possible that a professor might note your absence, and then penalize you appropriately.

This is a great question and a great debate, so I thought I would weight in. Actually, I already have weighed in on this topic, in chapter 57 of my first book: How to Win at College. As the excerpt above reveals, my advice is unambiguous: always go to class.

Why to Attend

When I first wrote about this topic in How to Win, I gave three main reasons for attending class:

1. As mentioned in the comments thread from Friday, professors often give indicators (sometimes subtle) about which material is worth really knowing and which you don’t have to sweat.
2. You concentrate better in a lecture hall, listening to the professor in person, surrounded by your solemn peers, then you do trying to read notes or the textbook in your dorm room with the TV blaring. In short: it’s a quicker way to learn material well.
3. Finally, if you skip any class even once then this suddenly becomes an option for all your classes. You now have to endure this debate before every lecture, and that’s a hard battle to win, especially during a tired (read: hungover) morning — which occur often. You’re much better off keeping class attendance mandatory, always, and take the skipping option off the table.

I want to add a fourth argument that was not originally included in How to Win. It goes as follows: attending class is a sign to yourself that you’re taking your academics seriously. Even if you could review the material on your own, to get up and drag your ass to the lecture hall is like callisthenics’s for your willpower. If you’re worried about wasting time in a lecture that presents no new material, then study the material during class; it’s the best study location on campus! But just make sure you get there.