Despite talk of “ungrading” and other non-grading alternatives to evaluating student learning, most educational institutions still run on standard letter grade assessment, and your GPA when you graduate plays a part in your next phase of life, whether that’s getting hired for your first job or applying to graduate school. So, how to make the grade without burning out on all-nighters and saying no to everything else?
Here’s the real talk on what real college students do:
They study in short, focused blocks of time rather than pseudo-working through the night.
Those long work sessions you’re pulling where you have a show streaming, check your phone, and snack? You’re not really working, you’re pseudo-working. Sure, you feel really busy. You might even feel productive, but you’re achieving much less learning and eating up a lot of your precious time with this inefficient tactic.
Short blocks of focused study consisting of one task only—just write that paper, review those flashcards—will increase your learning and success and reduce the time you spend to achieve it. Aim for 50 minute blocks of efficient, uninterrupted work (don’t interrupt yourself, either, by checking your Snapchats). You’ll find you’ll get better results in fewer of these intensive blocks than you have with your all-nighters.
- Make it happen: get a calendar, mark your blocks of work, and stick to your schedule. Set a timer when you start. Take a break when the timer goes off. Definitely put your phone away, shut down all those tabs for social media sites for those work blocks. Repeat, but not all night. You won’t have to.
They find their most common excuses with a work progress journal and eliminate the excuse.
You know you’re your own worst enemy, right? Find out how you’re sabotaging yourself by keeping a work progress journal. Once you know how you’re getting in your own way, you can clear the road.
We all have things that feed our procrastination or behaviors that set us up to fall short of rather than exceed our goals and expectations. Planning to get up early to study, make it to class on time, and finish scholarship applications today? But then you stayed up until 2 AM scrolling TikTok videos, slept in, missed class, and took a nap later instead of getting your applications in? Whoops. You can catch the patterns that create obstacles by keeping a journal. Once you know the pattern, you can change it.
- Make it happen: Each morning, write down your most important tasks, the things you need to do that day, include going to class and doing the laundry if it’s laundry day and you’ll have to wear the same shirt tomorrow if you don’t get it done. Each evening, cross of all of the tasks you accomplished. You might already be doing this, so, easy-peasy so far. Here’s the twist: for everything you didn’t cross out, explain why it didn’t get done. After you do this for a week and you see “I stayed up until 2 AM scrolling TikTok videos and woke up late and couldn’t focus” several times, you know your problem. Once you get tired of seeing that excuse, you’ll realize it’s in your power to change it. And you will.
They work through exams with the 3P approach: Planning. Proceeding. Proofreading.
Approaching every exam with a basic strategy in place can help you eliminate the anxiety, be deliberate, and do your best work. Use a few minutes to take stock of the whole exam. The winning strategy: map out a plan of attack, work through easy-to-hard, and wrap it up with a review instead of rushing out after you answer the last question is a winning strategy.
- Make it happen. Here’s your battle-strategy for every class, every exam.
(1) Plan. Flip through the entire exam, take stock of what questions you have to answer, and map out a quick order of how you’ll tackle the questions (easy ones first!) and allot some time to each of them. When you’re mapping out the time, keep a ten minute buffer at the end.
(2) Proceed. Start with the easier questions; they’re quick wins to boost your confidence. Then, move on to harder problems.
(3) Proofread. Use your last ten minutes (and any additional, remaining time) to proofread and correct any mistakes you find or add important information you previously left out. Don’t skip this step! This kind of deliberate practice is what separates the average from the A student.
