The Good Grades Guide

If I’m ever reviewing for a test, but find myself distracted or unmotivated, I take a short break, remind myself what the starting salary of a software engineer is, then try again. The most effective thing I do, as I study my way through classes, is keep a steady goal that I can always look towards. The advice covered in this article and every other study tip out there can only help you if there exists conscious effort on your part. Figure out what you want to accomplish and the path it takes to get there. Even if you don’t have your timeline after high school mapped out, a short-term goal such as "Keep my average above 80%" is plenty. This is what you will return to when you need to remind yourself why you’re doing what you’re doing.

My physics teacher, Ms. Blackwell, remarks that students will often place significantly more time and effort into writing up a lab, compared to a night of homework. She notes that this is because students know their performance in labs will directly affect their marks, while homework is more of a process that only pays off on a distant day. In the end, though, tests are weighted much heavier.

Do your homework, every single night. Even when you aren’t assigned anything, sit down and do 15 minutes of review from the previous day’s lesson. When test day comes, and you’re not stressed, sleepless, and frustrated, you’ll thank yourself. You’ll never be able to magically teach yourself an entire unit in one or two nights, so don’t give yourself a headache trying. Keep slow and steady, and you’ll find that success comes naturally.

You need to remember to be realistic when you make your plans. It’s easy to feel a sudden burst of motivation, then begin to mark your days full of 14-hour study sessions with zero breaks. I recommend you don’t learn from experience that these are impossible to maintain.

I used to spend every spare moment I had either studying or thinking about studying. I’d bring trig worksheets to parties, and stress an unreasonable amount when traffic was too heavy, since that meant I was losing an extra 10 minutes of physics review. Obviously, this behaviour was not sustainable, and all it ever really led to was burn out. The aftermath was always, and without exception, days where I would barely accomplish anything due to built-up exhaustion. Even now, when I hold unreasonable expectations for productivity, I get less done.

So, learn from my mistakes. Never go more than two hours without a break, set aside days where you won’t crack open your textbook once, and keep school out of other areas of life. If you overwhelm yourself too quickly and too soon, you may find that you won't get far.

Whenever a friend asks me to explain a concept, I always end up describing it in the most straightforward way possible. In doing so, I force concision and strip things down to their simplest form, and afterwards, I’m able to recall them faster and with more clarity.

It’s easy when you’re asked a question by a friend, and the opportunity to explain something falls into your lap, but even if it doesn’t, strive to recreate how you would go about teaching someone. Try pretending to lecture about a subject without looking at your notes, explaining a topic from scratch to a friend who’s never taken the course, or describing the logic behind how you worked towards an answer as if you were tutoring someone. When you force concepts into their most compact form, you'll likely find that they are much easier to recall when it counts.