College comes with a lot of pressure to perform, and it’s not difficult to see why.
At this stage in your life, you are only a step away from beginning your dream career. Besides the anticipation of this, you are also at a stage where you are aware of the high fees you or your family are paying for your college education or even the student loan you have.
Indeed, there is a lot at stake, and your only option is to perform well and graduate. If your grades are struggling, it might be comforting to know that this happens to plenty of other students. You, however, cannot let it go on for too long as it might bring down your GPA and even ruin your chances of graduating on time.
Are you desperate to perform better? Here are some tips.
- Attend All Courses
This is by far the easiest thing to do. For one, some college professors have a minimum number of classes you must attend for them to qualify you to sit exams. At the very least, attend all classes, except with good reason, to give yourself the chance to sit your exams. Without this, you are setting yourself up to fail.
Secondly, being in class has its added benefits. The first is that you pick up tips from lecturers. Whether consciously or subconsciously, lecturers will every so often mention areas that you are likely to be tested on in exams.
If this is not mentioned explicitly, you can still pick up this information from the topics and ideas your teachers place more emphasis on.
- Keep Deadlines
Keep deadlines to avoid missing assignments. Typically, you get penalized for late assignments and get no marks for skipped ones. Even if you perform well in your CATS and exams, these penalties and missed scores pull down your final grade.
Work to accumulate as many points as possible during the semester. This will significantly boost your exam grade.
- Take Effective Notes
Everything said in class is not necessarily note-worthy. Learn to identify relevant information, as well as how to arrange it in a manner that makes sense. This will make it much easier to revise.
Whenever possible, use the time immediately after each class to find any important information you might have missed out when it is still fresh in your memory.
- Seek Help
Students have different aptitudes for different courses. This notwithstanding, you get graded for all courses you take as part of your degree. This means that the course you fail will inadvertently affect your final grade.
To avoid this, do your best in the courses you are great at, and when possible, seek help for those you are weak at.
Say you are taking both communication and probability courses, and are excellent at the former and performing dismally at the latter, you can get assistance for probability questions as you handle your communication assignments.
Similarly, seek help from your professors, bright students in class and private tutors.
- Use Fun Learning Tools
While learning can, at times, feel like a burden, it does not always have to. Some students find it easier to internalize information when they discuss it exhaustively in a focus or study group. This is something you can try out and see if it helps you study better.
In the same way, consider using learning technologies to spice up learning by making it more relatable, fun, and memorable.
Look for learning tools that align best with the courses you are taking and see how well they are able to support learning.
If you do this right, not only will you perform better at your exams, but also, you find it much easier to understand and apply learned concepts.
Image Credits: Juan Ramos
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