If you are planning on applying to graduate or professional schools after college, then you know how important it is to earn impressive grades during your undergraduate years. Of course, most schools require you to maintain a certain GPA just to continue attending classes, but it’s important that you know how to get really good grades — the kind that stand out on a transcript. Here are 5 inside secrets to getting good grades in college.
- Always Attend Class
You may not be in high school anymore and your professor may not even take attendance, but that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t be present at every class. You will cover a lot of material in each lecture and if you miss a few here and there, you could quickly fall very far behind. If you want to earn good grades, you have to go to every class and be prepared by having the required reading done.
- Communicate With Your Professors
From time to time there are going to be situations where you are going to hope that your professor will give you the benefit of the doubt. If it’s because your hard drive got wiped clean, you lost your book, or you accidentally locked yourself out of your dorm room, you’re going to be in need of a tiny bit of sympathy and leeway at some point. That’s why it’s important that you email or meet with your professors during their office hours so that they can get to know you and develop a relationship of trust with you.
- Always Write Chapter Summaries
If you really want to make sure that you have a handle of all the material covered in class, then you should always write a chapter summary when you get to the end of any chapter in your required reading. This summary shouldn’t take up any more than a page of space and it should cover all the broad topics and salient points addressed within the chapter. If you can do that, then you should be able to perform very well on all of your exams and papers.
- Complete Your Work Early
It doesn’t matter whether you go to Marylhurst University or Oxford University, if you allow yourself to procrastinate, you won’t be able to maintain good grades, and you certainly won’t feel like you have things under control. When you get an assignment, you want to not only write down the due date in your agenda, you also want to reserve as much time as it should take to complete on specific dates and times. Always err on the side of too much time so that you can surprise yourself with extra leisure time, rather than extra work time.
- Write All of Your Tasks Down
If you want to stay on top of all of your responsibilities then you’re going to have to make sure you write absolutely everything down. You should be looking at your agenda each morning to get a lay of the land for your day. Then you should take it out at the beginning and end of each class to be sure that you are on schedule with all of your assignments.
