Easy Tips to Improve your grade
S-312.264
Area : General
Topic : Skill
Every aspiring student wants to do better in their studies and acquire better grades in their exams. For that, most of them work to their best abilities. However, not all succeed to celebrate the fruit of their hard work. The reason behind the failure is only the fact that, we do not know exactly what are the things to focus on and what really we need to follow. Most of us spend a lot of time with our books, which, does not yield any good. We discuss in this article 8 easy and effective ways to defeat procrastination.
#1. Focus: The problem with most of the students is, they get into something called pseudo work. This is, where students work in a distracted environment, like someone who’s working with the TV on in front of them or even while studying in the study group where you aren’t really studying much. This actually hurts your brain’s ability to focus and think clearly and efficiently. This requires much more work to achieve the same retention of information, compared to someone working a much shorter amount of time with no distractions. Deep work is what top students often do. They focus very intensely with no distractions like phone or social media for shorter periods of time. This has shown to increase productivity by a large amount. Remember your quality of work is equal to the time spent time to the intensity of your focus. You may not realize it, but checking your phone real quick has a larger effect on your focus than you may think. Top students often participated in focus study first, or they focused with no distractions for about an hour and did this throughout the day until they studied what was needed. This means your brain won’t become drained from focusing for too long and will actually study in less time than those who are distracted.
#2. Time Management: For time management, you should keep a calendar of some sort and just take 5 minutes either in the morning or right before bed to plan out the day ahead. You can do this easily with something like Google Calendar. You control your classes for the entire semester in one color. Then deadlines or exams might be in another. The time you plan to study might be in another color. When your teacher tells you a new homework assignment, write it down really quick, then transfer to your calendar at night or in the morning during your 5 minutes. Workplans and Deadlines, that are only in your head, simply distract you and drain your energy. Having things written down, will you just look at your calendar and know what you need to do for the day. If this seems like a lot, trust me, the habit will form if you keep doing it, don’t spend more than five minutes or just becomes a chore.
#3: No procrastination. Procrastination is a menace for any aspiring student. Although, at times, every one of us, willingly or not, defer the important works for later. Almost no students defeated the urge to procrastination. This is just natural. Some things in school tasks are just boring and we don’t want to do them. But top students found ways to manage that feeling, even if they couldn’t avoid it. You may read our article on How to Defeat Procrastination.
#4. Start Early: For best results, you should study early in a day. As early relative to when your day begins. Students work best between the time they wake up and the time to eat lunch. Sometimes, this can be challenging because, that’s when your classes start. But if you can try to go to the library, maybe between classes and get work done, you will thank yourself for it at night. In terms of where you should study, the answer is, in isolation. You want to work in a place with no distractions, so you can achieve that deep work. Now, the exception of this is, study groups, especially for technical courses like engineering, math and science. If you’re stuck on a problem for too long. Study group can definitely help. We ought to know that study groups can be more talking than studying, so be sure to plan that with the right people. How long you should study? No more than an hour without a break. This goes back to our topic of deep work. Your mind can only handle so much concentration study intensely, then take a break. Think about this, most people out there cannot run a four-minute mile. Even top high school athletes. But many high school athletes could run a one minute, quarter mile, four times throughout the day with breaks. In terms of track n field, running this quarter mile in a minute multiple times won’t set you any records. But in terms of studying, it’s not all the same. You basically ran that four-minute mile, but you don’t burn out as much. The break from studying should ideally be small, maybe up to 10 minutes, but that will help refresh your brain more than you may realize. You don’t need to quit social media altogether just for like an hour at a time.
#5. Don’t Skip Classes: You need to make sure that you go to classes. It’s equally important that you listen and understand how your professor explains a certain concept or attacks a certain problem. It is also a matter of learning and is an important thing. It also saves you time. By missing classes, you usually have to do even more work on your own to catch up. Some classes, particularly those non-technical ones, which mostly involve concepts, you should not write down everything that the professor says one. Take note of big ideas and summarize the rest. But in technical courses, you should write down everything you can. Write down every little thing. Some would constitute the principle concepts while others will work as example problems. An example problem will help you analyzing your concepts when you study.
#6. Consistency: You should also be doing consistent working rather than cramming. Top students study a little nearly every day as opposed to cramming the day or two before a midterm. However, I agree that you may need to cram, but that is only on those few days that you have scheduled for pre-revision studies. For every other day before that, focus more on regular consistent and concept-based study.
#7. Doing Revision: Next when it comes to revising what you have studied, one of the best things is the quiz and recall method. The best thing you can do is not just read once more, but replicate what you have gone over. It can be recalling definition, explaining a certain concept or term in your own words out loud, or if it’s in math, do a problem completely from scratch without looking at your notes. If you can complete it, then you have done it right, else you need to revisit them once again.
If you have questions from past years available, make sure you use those, but use those near the end. At the beginning, do all the studying you need from your textbook and notes. Don’t even look at the previous exams, first. Then when you’re ready, take these questions of previous exams under real exam conditions, and with no option modes and give yourself a tight time range, like an hour or whatever it is, to solve. Then see how you did and if needed go over the materials once again.
#8. While Taking Exams: The first thing you want to do is review the whole test before you solve anything. Just glance through all the questions. This will help you to make prior judgement how to answer them. This will also make you get all the surprises at the beginning, if there are any and you will get enough time to think how to tackle them. Then you should do a quick time preparation. For this, determine how much time you have for the test, then subtract 10 minutes and divide that by the numbers of questions that you need to attempt. That is your time per problem. At the end you will then have a 10 minute to review your answers. Now, answer easiest first. Top students rarely go in order of the exam. You may be jumping all over the test, but that’s OK. If something doesn’t come to you immediately, skip it to the next and then come back to it later.
Remember, spending more time studying is always helpful. But, if you’re looking for ways to maximize the effects of the time you spend for studies, try to adopt these different study habits. Don’t think of time as the one reason why you can’t improve. You may have a busy schedule for sure, but you just need to get creative. Practice these recommendations till they become part of your nature, as with any habit. Hopefully, at the end you’ll see your grades start improving.