About once or twice a month, I will get an e-mail from a college student who is in real need of some advice to turn around poor academic performance. Sometimes a scholarship is on the line. Often, it’s the wrath of watchful, tuition-paying parents that’s driving the desperation. Whatever the case, in responding to these e-mails, I’ve learned to extract from the large corpus of tips surronding my study philsopophy, a core set of advice that can effect a rapid change of academic fortunes.
Here are the vital five, as I sometimes call them: tips for creating a drastic change, quickly, to a poor academic record. These changes aren’t easy. But if you need results, and are willing to follow through, they’ll get the job done:
- Attend every class. Take notes on a laptop.
- 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.
- 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.
- Replace rote review with quiz and recall.
- 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.
I’m not sure I agree with the first point made. I fared extremely well attending only ~30% classes, but I’m not from the US or Canada, so I can’t really judge the effects of such “absenteeism” at universities there. Still, a lot of time lectures resemble something you stress students shouldn’t do while studying: rote review. I therefore think it’s important to separate the wheat from the chaff and attend only lectures that are going to contribute to knowledge gained in a particular field.
I’m a freshman at MIT this year, and I did really badly first semester: I failed ALL of my classes, but by barely a point. I know how to do the math I just didn’t do psets. I generally meant to, but started far too late, and had only at most a few hours to finish psets for classes like 18.700 and 18.022 and I had never written thesis-driven essays before, coming to MIT from 11th grade, so I also failed my HASS class (getting a D). I’d like some tips please. I’ve been reading all of the articles on your blog but I’m not quite sure how to frame them together into a coherent system that I can actually follow and make into a habit. The only thing I’ve realized really is that I need to study the way I learn, which for math is intuitively, but that seems to be too easy to put off. I feel like I have too much time to study effectively, and then I end up leaving things off until the very end, at which point I have almost no time to study or finish psets or essays/readings. What should I do?