This week’s column is a follow-up to one of the most well-read Great Career Success Debate columns posted last October called 6 ways you can spend less time studying and still get better grades.
Question: I’m going to class and studying hard, but I’m still not getting A’s. What am I doing wrong?
Susan’s Take: Getting an A in college isn’t easy. Good grades are not simply the result of the quantity of time you study. They are also the result of the quality of how you study. So while you might be putting in tons of time, you might not be putting in the right kind of time.
Below are two of my favorite (and somewhat unconventional) study strategies. I can’t guarantee that they’ll work for you, but I can tell you that they worked wonders for my GPA.
- Maximize Your Visual IQ. Many people are visual learners, but students rarely take full advantage of their visual IQ. If your current study habits are not getting you the grade you desire, try this old-fashioned technique.
Take a poster board and write out your class notes with markers making sure the important points can be seen from far away. Use color to emphasize important points.
Next hang the poster in your room so that you can see it all the time – not just when you make an intentional effort to study, but every time you are in the room watching TV, brushing your teeth, or just hanging out.
You can’t help but learn the information because you’re looking at it on your walls all the time whether you want to or not. When you close your eyes you might even be able to see the information on the poster which comes in very handy during the exam. For best results, hang your poster at least one week prior to an exam.
- Pretend You Are the Professor. If you’re like many students, you’re already in a study group because you know that studying with other people is an effective way to learn. Study groups can be helpful, but they don’t always get you to an A. Try supplementing your study group effort with the following technique:
Pretend you are teaching the class. Teach yourself the material by saying it OUT LOUD. The out loud part is important because it triggers your auditory leaning. Next make an exam as if you were the professor and give yourself an actual written exam.
This technique works because of the auditory learning component as well as the anticipation of possible test questions. It’s amazing how much material you think you know when you are simply going over it in your mind. You actually learn what you don’t know when you have to create an exam and write out your answers to sample questions.
Susan’s Bottom Line: The study skills and the effort that got you A’s in high school will not get you A’s in college. You need to take things up a notch and expand your way of studying if you want to earn the elusive college A. The somewhat unconventional, yet proven strategies we share in this column will get you well on your way to an A .
Pat’s Take: If you’d like to still have friends (and also get A’s), you may not want to have posters with Botany 141 and History 223 all over the walls of your dorm room. I’m all for going to great lengths to land an A, but we do want to make sure you won’t be sitting home alone on weekend nights because you’ve become that really odd kid who has posters all over his walls. Here are my two suggestions:
- Take more and better notes. Common sense, right? To execute on this no-brainer, sit FRONT and CENTER in the class. Even if the lecture is painfully boring, if you’re sitting in that front row center seat (that is virtually always empty), you’ll be forced to stay in the game mentally as common courtesy will prevent you from falling asleep or tweeting. It’s a very simple success tip – but it works. I won’t bore you with the details, but there has actually been research done on this, and if you sit in the front and center, you increase your likelihood of good grades. While you are there, be an aggressive note taker. Assume you will remember almost nothing, and try to capture virtually every key point delivered in the lecture in your notes.
- Take notes of your notes. In my book, Making College Count, I call these notes your “notes-notes.” Where I differ from Susan is that I would definitely not copy all of your notes over. I would scour your notes for what you believe to be the most important and most testable concepts within them. Think like a professor! What will he or she want to test on? From 50 pages of notes, you can cut to 4-5 pages of notes-notes more easily than you might imagine. Then learn those note-notes first. From there, you can review the rest of your notes, highlights in your book, etc., but you will find that the bulk of the test material comes from the notes-notes. Once you have a solid command of that content, you can fairly easily pick up “details” from your original notes and the text. And, you won’t need to put anything on your dorm room walls!
Pat’s Bottom Line: It’s not just the quantity of studying that matters, it’s the quality of your effort as well. Great notes are your foundation to success. Prioritizing what you learn from those notes with my notes-notes technique will prepare you to get the A’s you want.
Are you transitioning from college to career or working in your first job after graduation? If so, we’d love to answer any question you may have related to career success. Send your first name, school, and/or employer to AskPatandSusan@gmail.com and we’ll try to address your question in a future article.