Bonus material

Here is some material that either didn’t make it into the book or only occurred to me after I submitted the manuscript. This may not be as good as the stuff that did make it in, but you still might find something worthwhile.

Bonus tips

Bonus Tip 1: Don’t be afraid to challenge your professors.

I often hear it said that the golden path to success in college is to regurgitate the professor’s ideas back to him or her. This may be true of some classes, but the better professors, the ones you should be seeking out, will ask you to do more than this. They want you to take issue with their opinions or at least the opinions they present. They want you to see where these arguments fall short and their favorite teaching moments are when students make original or unexpected criticisms of the course material.

After all, this is what we do constantly when we interact with our peers. Research, which is our lifeblood, is nothing but challenging received ideas and trying to come up with better, clearer, more accurate ones.

Of course, there are good challenges and there are bad ones. I don’t mean bad as in wrong. It won’t be held against you to make a mistake. A bad challenge is one that calls into question the very idea of the class or which questions the professor’s authority to run the class as he or she sees fit. While some professors may allow you to challenge them in this way, many will react negatively to such challenges. They think (rightly or wrongly) that this way chaos lies. They typically reserve the right to set the agenda, but give you freedom to come up with any sort of criticisms within that agenda. In terms of Robert’s Rules of Order, they want your objections to be relevant. But once they are relevant, the more critical the better.

Bonus Tip 2: Conduct a postmortem at the end of every semester.

At the end of the semester, just about every student takes a big sigh of relief and heads off for some relaxation or at least a change of pace. Notes and textbooks are quickly filed away and exams put out of mind. I don’t want to sound like a grind and ask you to keep your attention on schoolwork even when school is over. Sure, everyone needs a break.

But I think it will yield large dividends to spend a little time revisiting each semester (or even long-gone semesters) even after they are finished. At the least, ask yourself about your performance and how you could have improved it. If you were starting the previous semester from scratch knowing what you know now, what would you have done differently. Is it getting an earlier start on projects? Is it choosing different courses? Consider applying those lessons to your next semester.

Besides just trying to achieve greater success, ask yourself what intellectual lessons you want to take away from your classes. What were the main ideas and skills you think are worthwhile and that you want to maintain? Try to see beyond the facts that you learned – you will inevitably forget these anyway – and consider the larger principles that you’d like to remember. It would help to write them down.

Finally, and I may be getting a little crazy here, I think it is worthwhile to every so often go back over your class notes and old exams and essays to remind yourself of what you had learned. I think that if you spend just a tiny amount of time doing this, you will develop a much stronger retention of the material. I would guess that if put your courses out of your head right after the final, you will lose maybe 90% of what you have learned in a few months and the rest in a year. But if you just spend an hour or two reading through your notes and papers once or twice a year, many of the details will stick in your memory and return to you each time you go through them.

Bonus text boxes

Bonus Text Box 1: Taking Exams

The sort of exams that professors give are too diverse to provide any knock-down advice on how to prepare for them. Some professors want you to regurgitate information, others to think outside of the box; some focus on material covered in the lectures, others on material you were supposed to read independently. Probably your best bet is to determine what the professor is looking for, either by asking explicitly or by perusing exams from previous years.

What almost all professors, however, dislike is not following their instructions. Their exam questions will give clear indications of what they want you to do – what sort of information and argumentation you should provide. The farther you move away from this, the more harshly they will judge you. This can be seen in the questions that the philosophers Bill Pollard and Soran Reader have written in a parody of a philosophy exam (see below). Their point is that real exams never contain questions like this and so your answers should not read as if they did.

Philosophy Exam – First Year

1. Patch together some things you have heard in lectures, in no particular order.

2. Has this question vexed philosophers for centuries?

3. Create an impression of original thought by impassioned scribbling (your answer may be ungrammatical, illegible, or both).

4. Does the answer to this question depend on what you believe?

5. How much irrelevant historical background can you give before addressing this question?

6. Describe two opposing views, then say what you personally feel.

7. Rise above the fumbling efforts of others and speculate freely on an issue of your choice.

8. EITHER (a) Answer this question by announcing that it really means something different (and much easier to answer).

OR (b) Write out your answer to last year’s question on this topic.

9. Protest your convictions in the teeth of obvious and overwhelming objections.

10. Keep your reader guessing about what you think until the end. Then don’t tell them.

Bonus Text Box 2: Ethics for Students

Like any endeavor, college life poses ethical dilemmas. Many of these have obvious solutions. It is obviously wrong to cheat on exams or purchase assignments from essay mills. The best way to prevent yourself from engaging in these acts is both to avoid the last minute crush that leads to desperate decisions and to stay in touch with professors when you get in those situations – it is better to ask for an extension or to turn in your assignment late than to cut and paste in a panic at 4 AM.

But other situations are more complicated and require a bit more thinking. There is not space here to cover them in any comprehensive way, but it is worth laying out some dilemmas that you may confront. For more discussion, I recommend the website of the Markkula Center for Ethics at Santa Clara which has an excellent blog on these issues called “The Big Q”.

• Plagiarism. Just about all students know that it is wrong to attribute someone else’s work to yourself. Quotations and even ideas drawn from other people’s work need to be cited. But the line between your own work and the work of others can be tricky, especially when you are working in a group. Professors themselves sometimes fall afoul of these rules as cases like the popular historian Doris Kearns Goodwin show. The best rule of thumb here is to cite as comprehensively as you can (1). You should also consult with your professor about their expectations on this score.

• Free Speech. There is much controversy about what you have a right to say in classroom and on campus. Many universities have set up speech codes in an attempt to limit hateful or offensive speech. These codes are frequently clumsy and usually illegal and unconstitutional, especially at public universities (2). As the Supreme Court noted, students do not “shed their constitutional rights when they enter the schoolhouse door.” But simply having the right to say things that hurt and offend does not mean that you should. Yes, there should be a vigorous and free exchange of ideas where little is out of bounds, but try to make sure that this is a debate about ideas, not personalities.

• Parents. Should your parents have access to your grades or be able to speak with your professors about your classes? Federal law prohibits universities from releasing your grades and professors from discussing your performance without your explicit permission. You are an adult and it is your decision whether you involve your parents in these issues. But if your parents are helping to pay for college, you may want to involve them in what you are getting out of it.

• Artificial Study Aids. Students once got through exams and papers with massive doses of coffee. Increasingly, they have been turning to drugs like Adderall that help them to concentrate. Besides the legal and health concerns from using these drugs, you should also consider whether these drugs are giving you an unfair advantage over fellow students. Some schools are considering prohibiting their use for this very reason (except for students with a prescription), just as athletes are forbidden from taking steroids. You should also keep in mind that the benefits of these drugs are often just in getting you through exams, not in increasing your learning or long-term performance.

• Enrollment. Registration time is often stressful for students as they find that courses they want to enroll in fill up before they get a slot. Universities typically deal with the scarcity of course slots through a lottery that gives students equal access. Some students have tried to override this solution by either paying other students or making side arrangements to obtain course slots. This raises a number of ethical issues, particularly about using one’s better financial position or insider connections to gain an advantage. Remember as well the large number of fantastic courses out there which are as good or better than the ones you want to take.

(1) For a short guide to citation, see www.press.uchicago.edu/books/lipson/honestcollege/citationfaq.html. For a comprehensive guide, see Charles Lipson, Doing Honest Work in College (University of Chicago Press, 2008).

(2) For an excellent guide to your free speech rights on campus, see David French, Greg Lukianoff, and Harvey Silverglate, FIRE’s Guide to Free Speech on Campus, available at www.thefire.org.

Bonus Text Box 3: What Professors Do All Day

Professors are most visible to students during their class time, but actual teaching takes up only a small portion of our work week. Preparation for class (especially if it is a new one), grading, and office hours add to this percentage. But that still leaves a lot of extra time. How are we keeping busy then and during the summer? Or are we just slacking off?

The table below gives a sense of some the things we do in addition to teaching. These include mentoring students, research, and administrative tasks. Each column is organized roughly in order from the most time-consuming to the least. As with any accounting, your mileage will vary by professor. There are professors who find ways to avoid most of these tasks, but there are also those who do virtually all of them and for large numbers of students. I have drawn liberally from Eszter Hargittai’s catalog of how she spends her summer vacation and added a number of tasks that are more common during the school year (1).

(1) Eszter Hargittai, “How I Spent Summer ‘Vacation’”, Inside Higher Ed, 2 October 2013.

Bonus Text Box 4: The Recommendation Letter You DON’T Want

Here is an example of the impersonal letter of recommendation you should expect to receive if a professor only knows you from a large lecture class. Before writing one of these I usually explain to students that they should really seek out a professor who knows them better, but many persist. By getting to know your professors better, you can avoid recommendations like this. That is one of the side benefits of following the tips in this book.

To Whom It May Concern,

I would like to give Joe Ordinary my strong recommendation to law school. I taught Mr. Ordinary two years ago in my Introduction to Comparative Politics class, a large lecture course that introduces students to the main theories in comparative politics.

He received an A- which puts him in the top 25% of his class. Though I did not get a chance to interact with Joe personally, my TA assures me that he performed very well on all of the class exercises and was a frequent contributor to discussion section. I am sure that he will be an asset to your law school.

Sincerely,

Andrew Roberts