essay on getting good grades

But it is vital that you do the following:

• Develop the mindset and motivation to work hard
• Spend your limited time as effectively as possible to get the best results

That's what this guide is about.

I'm a very straightforward person, and I speak my mind. This means that some advice might rub you the wrong way. If that's the case, try to focus on the bigger picture and on the advice you do like. I don't want you to throw the baby out with the bathwater just because you think I'm a jerk. My focus is on helping you do better, and one of the best ways is to share my experiences honestly, warts and all.

I did indeed go through a lot of stress in high school and put in a ton of effort. I think I was obsessive about achievement and have a high capacity for mental pain, and I happen to love working hard. I don't think it's optimal for most students to do what I did and feel what I felt, and I'll explicitly point this out at places. So just because I describe my experience doesn't mean I always condone it for everyone.

If you're aiming for a 4.0 GPA, I'm guessing you also want to get into top schools in the country, so I'll orient this guide toward both goals. That said, I want to stress that a 4.0 is not required to get into top schools like Harvard and Princeton. You do not need perfect grades and test scores to get into the Ivy League. In fact, the average unweighted self-reported GPA of incoming students at Harvard is 3.95 . Thus, a 4.0 is really not that different from a 3.9 from the eyes of the college.

Do not freak out if you have high college goals and don't already have a perfect GPA. It's nowhere near the end of the world. I explain more about why in my guide to getting into Harvard .

The 4.0 number is not all you should aim for— the rigor of your coursework makes a big difference (this is where the concept of the weighted GPA comes in). Ideally, you'll take difficult courses and excel in them. But if you have to make a tradeoff, I'd lean toward the more difficult courses; a letter grade of a B in an AP class is better than an A in a regular class.

Despite the title of this guide, the concepts are widely applicable to GPAs in all ranges. Even if you're not aiming strictly for a 4.0, applying the advice here will get you closer to a 3.8 GPA or a 3.0 GPA or wherever you're aiming. You can use all the strategies here to improve your grades and raise your GPA. This is geared toward high school students, but for readers currently in college, the concepts apply equally to you and often even more so since you don't have as much parental structure over your work.

This guide targets high-achieving students who want to aim for academic success and push themselves to be better. As weird as it sounds, this is not the stance everyone should take. Yes, I know how stressed out students are these days about getting into college. No, I don't think everyone should feel as though they need to get into Stanford. Everyone has different academic goals, and this guide isn't for everyone.

I don't think everyone should aim for the toughest course load and perfect grades. Not enough students and families make decisions for personal happiness and are in a state of constant stress, especially if they always feel as if they're not doing enough. This can have bad long-term consequences. (In fact, applying the advice below should actually make your academic life easier because you're spending your time more effectively.)

That said, I do believe there are huge benefits to academic success. Not only does it lead to obvious benefits like better colleges and more rewarding careers, but it also trains fundamental skills that are applicable to improving the rest of your life.

When I was in high school, I knew I wanted to get into a top school like Harvard, and I knew I was willing to endure the sacrifices and pain to get there. I cared deeply about my academic success and I constantly pushed myself to get better. If this sounds like you and you honestly want to get a 4.0 for good reasons, then you'll vibe strongly with my advice.

Yes, I know there are other things in life that are more important than getting into the best college. But I also know it's a valuable goal for many of you, so I'm orienting this guide toward that. When you hear me say, "Do this to improve your college application," you should read this as, "Do this if college admissions is an important goal to you."

Finally, I co-founded a company called PrepScholar . We create online SAT/ACT prep programs that adapt to you and your strengths and weaknesses . While you do not need to buy a full prep program to get a great score, I believe PrepScholar is the best SAT program available right now, especially if you find it hard to organize your prep and don't know what to study. In any case, the fact that I run a test-prep company doesn't really affect my advice below.

I hope you're still with me and that the above cleared up some concerns you had coming into this article. Now, let's get started.

What Roles Do Coursework and GPA Play in College Admissions?

To understand how colleges think, it's important to put yourself in their shoes. I explain this in more detail in my guide on getting into Harvard and the Ivy League . In short, colleges want to admit students who are going to change the world.

But how do you predict who's going to change the world when applicants are just 17-18 years old? By using their past achievement as a predictor of future achievement.

Admissions offices at colleges do a lot of research on what types of students they admit and how to predict which students are going to be most successful. Often in these studies, high school coursework has one of the strongest correlations with college grades.

The Dean of Admissions at Harvard has stated the following about the admissions process:

"We have found that the best predictors at Harvard are Advanced Placement tests and International Baccalaureate Exams, closely followed by the College Board subject tests. High school grades are next in predictive power, followed by the SAT and ACT."

The Dean of Admissions at Lawrence University , too, has commented on the importance of GPA in college admissions:

"In the majority of studies, high school grades have the strongest correlation with college grades. The SAT and ACT have the next strongest correlation, but this too is not surprising because they have a strong correlation with high school grades."

This isn't very surprising. It takes a lot of skill and effort to excel with a demanding high school course load. The qualities that bring success in high school—curiosity, motivation, hard work, good planning, time management, control of your own psychology—are likely to lead to success in both college and your career. These are all qualities I'm going to cover in this guide.

As you can see, your high school coursework is one of the most important pieces of your college application. In terms of time expenditure, it's by far where you'll be spending the most time: more than 2,000 hours per year at 180 school days * (7 hours/day in school + 4 hours of homework). This is equivalent to a full-time job!

Finally, just to beat a dead horse, here are snippets from admissions offices at top colleges on the importance of coursework in college applications:

"The high school transcript is almost always the most important document in a student's application. But it is hard to conceive of a situation in which the appearance (or absence) of any one particular class on a transcript would determine the applicant's outcome ... When the admissions committee looks at your transcript, it will not focus on whether you have taken any specific course. It will be far more interested to see that you have challenged yourself with difficult coursework, and have done well."

"There is no single academic path we expect all students to follow, but the strongest applicants take the most rigorous secondary school curricula available to them. ... Although schools provide different opportunities, students should pursue the most demanding college-preparatory program available, consistent with each student's readiness for particular fields of study."

"We give the greatest weight to your academic transcript. The rigor of the courses you've taken, the quality of your grades and the consistency with which you've worked over four years give us the clearest indication of how well you will do at Amherst."

Claremont McKenna

"While there is no minimum GPA requirement, competitive candidates for admission pursue the most demanding coursework possible and receive strong grades. We strongly recommend taking advantage of honors and advanced placement coursework when available. Many competitive applicants often go beyond the minimum recommended program."

Once again, don't get the wrong idea. "Most rigorous secondary school curricula" does not mean "take every AP class under the sun, at the expense of sleep and your sanity."

Says Stanford on this subject,

"The students who thrive at Stanford are those who are genuinely excited about learning, not necessarily those who take every single AP or IB, Honors or Accelerated class just because it has that designation."

In essence, colleges by no means want to promote unhealthy obsession over racking up AP courses, especially if you're not interested in the material.

However, if you can ace the most advanced course load available to you and build a strong application, you're at the level that the best colleges are looking for.

What This 4.0 GPA Guide Is All About

As I mentioned at the beginning, this is not a guide in which I teach you actual math or writing content. This is a high-level strategy and planning guide meant to give you the right mindset and practices for achieving academic success.

I see this as the foundation on which you build your high school career. Just like in construction, if you have a weak foundation, your building will crumble, no matter how much effort you put into it. Build on a strong foundation, and you'll find studying far easier and more effective.

I've worked with a lot of students who see academic success purely as a content-mastery-and-brute-force problem—try hard enough to master the content and put in enough hours, and you'll do better. Unfortunately, if they're learning the wrong way or spending time on stuff that's not actually effective, they'll see quickly that their hard work is being wasted.

Here's what we'll cover in broad strokes. Each layer builds on the next and we'll go from high to low level:

Section 1: Mindset and Psychology

Section 2: overall planning and habits.

• Section 3: Individual Class Strategies

Section 4: Subject-by-Subject Strategies

Bonus section: 4 pieces of miscellaneous advice.

The most fundamental thing you need to control is your own psychology. You need to believe that you're capable of improving, and you need to be motivated to work hard. If you lack these two insights, you won't be able to put in the effort to achieve your goals, and you'll be crippled by small setbacks.

Let's look at exactly what you must do to get yourself in the right mindset.

#1: Have a Growth Mindset—Your Goal Is to Improve Constantly

Pop quiz. Tell me if you agree with any of these statements:

• You have a certain amount of intelligence, and you can't really do much to change it.
• You're naturally good at some things and not others, and what you're not good at you can't do much to improve.
• You're afraid of others knowing about your failures because of what your failures say about you.
• You want to hide your flaws so that you're not judged a failure. You're afraid of looking dumb.
• You often get angry when you get negative feedback about your performance.

If you strongly agree with even one of these statements, you have a critical problem with your psychology. You'll find it very hard to improve from your current situation because, deep down, you basically believe that you can't improve what you were born with. Every setback will pound you down, and you'll find it hard to make progress.

You're not alone. A lot of people, students and adults alike, believe intelligence is fixed: "People are just born smarter than others, and however smart you are now is how smart you'll be from here on out."

This is tempting to believe because your observations of the world seem to fit this idea. The smart kid at your school just always seems to ace everything without breaking a sweat, and she's always been that way. In contrast, you might have tried really hard in a class but ended up with a B. Or you might never have been good at math, so improving your math grades seems impossible.

A belief in a fixed intelligence has problems whether you believe you're smart or not. If you don't believe you're intelligent, then you've accepted that you'll never be intelligent. If you're bad at writing, you'll always just be bad at writing. People are "right-brained" or "left-brained," so of course they'll do worse in classes they're not good at!

While people definitely can have different talents, too often this kind of thinking is used to justify poor performance without thinking hard enough about how to actually improve.

Here's the trap—let's say you do poorly on something, like a math test. If you believe your talent is fixed, your excuse will be that you're bad and you'll always be bad. You won't seriously consider the fact that you can actually improve. You won't think hard about how you failed and what you need to change in order to stop failing.

(I'm using "fail" often here and it might sound intense to you. The way I think about it, if you want an A, then a B is a failure. You can't compromise this because you risk sliding into complacency and lowering your goals. So I'll continue using "fail" throughout this guide even though it usually means something far less severe than literally failing a class.)

This trap is easy to fall into because it's easier to blame something out of your control (an idea that you were born with, talent or not) than to admit that you just didn't work hard or effectively enough to meet your goal.

This isn't just relevant for low-performing students—it's a problem for high performers, too. High-achieving students often fall into a trap wherein they take failures too hard as a personal blow to their egos. They've been praised as smart from childhood and academics comes naturally to them. When they first encounter failure, they don't know how to react.

If you believe that classwork is about intelligence, and you believe your intelligence is high but fixed, then a failure in classwork will seem unsolvable. Every mistake and failed test will be a crushing blow to your ego, and you'll doubt yourself constantly and wonder if you're doing things right. I think this is partly why students who excel in high school end up floundering in college where classes are a lot more demanding and they don't have the structure of high school and parenting.

The Solution to a Fixed Mindset

The antidote to both problems is to adopt a growth mindset. This idea was developed by Carol Dweck, a psychology professor at Stanford, after decades of studying learners. Here's what she says :

"In a fixed mindset students believe their basic abilities, their intelligence, their talents, are just fixed traits. They have a certain amount and that's that, and then their goal becomes to look smart all the time and never look dumb. In a growth mindset students understand that their talents and abilities can be developed through effort, good teaching and persistence. They don't necessarily think everyone's the same or anyone can be Einstein, but they believe everyone can get smarter if they work at it."

In short, intelligence can be developed and trained. You can get better and smarter.

No matter how good you think you are now, your job is to get better and improve constantly. Your job is to use your experiences and failures to do better next time—not to accept your failures for what they are.

This idea comes from research. In a 2007 study , Dweck followed students transitioning from elementary school to junior high, when the material gets more challenging and the grading stricter. They wanted to see how the students' mindsets (fixed or growth) affected their math grades.

At the beginning of the project, students were surveyed to gauge their perspectives on learning and mindset. One question asked whether they agreed or disagreed with the idea that your intelligence is something very basic about you that you can't really change (just like I asked you at the beginning of this section).

Students with a growth mindset felt that hard work led to improvement. In response to a bad grade, growth-mindset students wanted to work harder or try different strategies.

In contrast, students with a fixed mindset believed that smart people didn't need to work hard to do well. When confronted with bad grades, students with fixed mindsets said they would study less in the future and attributed it to their own lack of ability.

At the start of junior high, students in both groups showed comparable math test scores. But as the math got harder, a gap appeared— students with a growth mindset showed growth in test scores, while those with a fixed mindset slumped.

Here's a model of how students with strong growth mindsets compare with those with strong fixed mindsets over a span of two years:

Imagine how this difference scales over 20 years of your life, from elementary school to college and eventually your career. The difference in the final result can be astounding.

This is why there's a recent movement for parents and teachers to stop calling kids smart . Adults think they're encouraging children with praise, but really they're promoting a fixed mindset. If you believe your success is due to intelligence and not hard work, then when you encounter failure, you'll blame your intelligence and not your lack of hard work.

Having a growth mindset is important because you will inevitably face challenges in your classwork. You will do much worse on a biology test than you expected. You'll get an essay back with a lot of red marks saying you just didn't get it.

It'll feel terrible. I'd know—despite my perfect grades, I was nowhere close to acing every single assignment and test.

But after you give yourself time to grieve, you need to analyze exactly what you did and figure out what went wrong. Your actions led to this subpar result, and you need to change your actions to improve your result.

This all starts with believing that you're capable of getting better. If you don't accept this, you'll just throw up your hands and resign yourself to your fate, which is basically like treating every class like a lottery. (Below, I'll talk more about how to use feedback to reflect on your study strategy and improve.)

The idea of a growth mindset is important throughout all of life, really. Whether you're learning how to ski or trying to build stronger friendships, the belief that you're capable of improving gives you the fuel to analyze your shortcomings objectively and actually try to improve them.

The alternative is to accept that you are now as good as you will ever be, and that whatever level you're at is how you'll stay for the rest of your life. That sounds pretty lame to me.

What Can You Do to Adopt a Growth Mindset?

If you said yes to any points in the pop quiz above, you're more likely to be operating in a fixed mindset. It's not likely you'll change this immediately since you've believed in a fixed mindset for many years.

Instead, you'll benefit from a mindset change and taking little steps in the right direction.

First, repeat after me:

• However good you are now, you can get better if you work hard and use your time effectively.
• Failures give you valuable feedback on how to improve. Failures are just temporary setbacks, and you'll do better in the future.
• You can learn to be good at anything because your abilities are almost entirely up to you.

Note that this isn't saying everyone can be an Albert Einstein or a Kobe Bryant. But you can get a lot closer than you think.

After you adopt a mindset change, the important steps are to apply the concepts to your work and continue believing in them. We'll spend a lot more time below explaining how to use feedback to improve your studying.

If you'd like to read more about the growth mindset, check out this article by Dweck or her book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success .

For some fun examples, here's a video of someone who learns to dance over a year with focused practice:

If a year seems like a lot of time, here's a video of a dude who learns to kickflip in a little more than five hours:

The same thing applies to coursework.

If you don't think you're naturally good at math, you can get better.

If you've never been a natural writer, you can learn to write effectively.

I'm dwelling on this point because it's so critical to breaking free from constraints that you place on yourself now. You can improve from where you are, and you can have a lifetime of growth.

#2: Be Prepared to Work Hard

We've already covered how top colleges consider coursework one of the most important pieces of college applications. These schools expect you to take a challenging course load with some of the hardest courses offered at your school (often AP or IB classes). You'll also have to do this while balancing extracurriculars, test prep, a social life, and your own sanity.

This means that your course load is going to be challenging, and your schedule will be demanding. It will take a serious amount of work to excel in every single class, and sometimes it will feel like you're just putting out new fires as fast as you can.

I probably spent at least an average of four hours a day on homework (including weekends) on projects and studying. This would increase dramatically when finals and AP exams came around.

There's no way around this. The smartest kid at your school might seem to just breeze through life and get straight As without breaking a sweat. (If she enjoys having this reputation, she might even actively foster it.)

The reality, however, is likely that this "perfect student" is busting her ass every day. She might just hide it well or doesn't really treat it like work, and so doesn't seem to be breaking a sweat. If you really enjoy learning, then working hard on schoolwork won't be nearly as painful.

If you're used to a comfortable life and schedule with many hours of free time every day, you'll probably have to start making tradeoffs in other areas of your life. If you care about highly competitive college admissions, you will need to orient your life toward that.

This usually means less personal relaxation or social time and cutting out an extracurricular that isn't adding to your application . (Again, I'm not saying you have to do this. Not every student should aim for top colleges and the most rigorous course load possible. But it's a meaningful goal and one that's important to a lot of you, so I'm just being real about what it takes.)

High school is of course four years, and so it's going to be a marathon.

It will take effective strategies to understand where to spend your limited time to get the maximum result.

It will take discipline to keep yourself focused when there are distractions everywhere.

It will take motivation to power through disappointments and setbacks.

But the rewards are worth it, and if you learn these skills, you'll be stronger in the rest of your life. We're going to talk about each of these aspects below.

#3: Find Something Deep to Drive You

For pretty much all ambitious students, high school coursework is going to be a grind. I'm not saying that learning isn't fun, but inevitably you'll have to do assignments you don't care about, sit in class listening to profoundly dull teachers, and prepare for exams that aren't fun. All of this is going to take time and mental energy to drive through the most painful parts.

Having motivation makes a big difference in how hard you work and how strongly you persist through difficulty.

It turns out that there are actually two types of motivation: extrinsic motivation (coming from outside) and intrinsic motivation (coming from within). One of them is a lot more durable than the other.

A common source of extrinsic motivation is parental pressure. If you fail a test, you're grounded. If you don't clean up your room, you have your phone taken away. More positively, if you get an A, maybe your parents buy you that pair of shoes you always wanted.

This can definitely work— but only in the short term and not reliably. While you might do your homework and stop texting for a night, ultimately it leads to frustration and resentment and won't be reliable for long periods of time.

Just remember the last time you argued with your parents about something they wanted you to do, like chores or homework. Fear of punishment can be an effective motivator, but it wears off, especially as you get older and more independent.

"Fine! Ground me, I don't care!" Sound familiar? If you rely on your parents to keep you motivated and your parents aren't around, you won't work.

In contrast, intrinsic motivation comes from within. It's something you want for yourself—screw what other people think.

You might have a dream college you want to attend.

You might want to prove your haters and doubters wrong.

You might want to compete with your nemesis and come out on top.

You might love learning things just because.

In the darkest of times, this motivation will drive you forward. When you're tired and would rather watch YouTube, the idea of getting a B will get you out of bed and keep you focused. When you get a C on your essay, the idea of failure will be unacceptable and you'll have no choice but to question where you fell short and how you can improve in the future.

Research shows that extrinsic motivation, such as rewards, are weak reinforcers in the short run and negative reinforcers in the long run .

Dig deep, find something internal you care about, and keep adding fuel to that fire.

I want to caution here that you should try to steer away from unhealthy motivations if possible. I was very competitive in high school to the point of being repugnant, and my high school atmosphere overall was pretty toxic. It's better if you can find something positive to encourage you that doesn't make you a jerk.

There's more on intrinsic vs extrinsic motivation here , written for teachers.

Up to this point, we've covered really high-level mindset and psychology. I know parts of this sound like hokey motivational speech, but trust me: way more students suffer from these problems than I would like.

Even though schools rarely cover these topics, I think they're the most critical of all. If you don't believe you have the capacity to improve, each failure will cripple you mentally. If you have nothing to drive you, your work every day will be painful. You need a super solid foundation on which to build your actual learning and study habits.

With this in mind, we'll talk about about the next level: good academic practices and habits.

In order to get a 4.0 GPA, you need more than just the right mindset— you need to cultivate effective study habits. This section goes over how to plan out your study schedule so that you're on track to getting a 4.0.

#1: Plan Out Your Specific Course Sequence Early

Let's start with the basics. You need to know early on what classes you're going to take your four years in high school. This will help prepare you mentally for what's to come. Once you make sure you have all the requirements in place, you'll be able to start gathering info on classes to come—and also be able to picture the story you're building for your college applications.

You can approach your course sequence in two ways:

• The first way is top down. How many AP classes do you want to have taken by the time you apply to college? Which ones? With this in mind, you can fill in the classes backward based on the requirements for each one.
• The other way is bottom up. What classes have you taken already? What's the logical, ambitious progression from this point forward? This will take you from now into senior year.

Gear your expected course sequence toward your interests. You don't have to take every single hard class available. Remember what Harvard's admissions office says: "[S]tudents should pursue the most demanding college-preparatory program available, consistent with each student's readiness for particular fields of study" (bold emphasis mine).

Roughly speaking, you tend to fit into one of the following categories:

• Math/science
• Social sciences

This is useful for colleges to understand what you lean toward. I was a science guy and made sure to take all the major AP sciences as well as Calc BC and Stats. I still took AP English, History, and Spanish, but I didn't take AP courses for economics, psychology, and others.

If you don't know what you're interested in, you can do a general spread of the usual courses. As I suggest in my guide to getting into Harvard , I recommend thinking about what you want your application story to be and deeply exploring specific interests rather than trying to be too well rounded. (Sorry to keep linking to my Harvard guide, but it contains my best admissions advice and resonates strongly with this guide!)

This also means that you don't have to play the same game as everyone else. You do not need to take exactly as many AP courses as the top student in your school does.

Are you a writer who really wants to showcase this talent in your college application? You don't have to take AP Biology. It might be really difficult and unenjoyable for you, and it will take up hundreds of hours that are far better spent elsewhere that will strengthen your application.

For my business, I interview and hire a lot of Ivy League graduates. When I ask about AP scores, it's actually rare for someone to have taken the full gamut of AP courses, or even close to the 14 AP tests that I took. Most often it's centered around their core interests.

Don't feel pressured to do what your friends are doing or what's generally accepted as right.

Finally, make sure you really understand all the prerequisites for each of the advanced courses and plan ahead. You might have to take summer-school courses—understand how this works and anticipate any issues.

A personal example: I wanted to take AP Biology my freshman year, which meant I had to take biology as a summer course after 8th grade. This was unusual and I was only one of two freshmen to do this.

The next year I wanted to take AP Chemistry as a sophomore, which required me to take chemistry in the summer. My high school only had two available classes for chemistry, and they prioritized older students. I didn't get the placement, which meant I had to register at a high school half an hour away and drive back and forth each day (thanks, Dad).

#2: Start Getting Early Info on Future Courses

Another benefit of planning early is that you can start gathering information on courses you'll be taking in future years. This will prepare you mentally for what's to come and let you structure your life accordingly, like having the right amount of extracurriculars so you can stay afloat.

Different schools have different reputations for how courses are run. At my school, AP Biology was seen as a hazing boot camp, requiring hardcore memorization of tiny details. In contrast, AP Physics was really laid-back, even though conceptually I think it's a lot more difficult.

This might be the opposite at other schools. Being able to predict this will help you prepare your life in advance and make sure you know what you're getting into.

Also, different teachers have different reputations. One AP Biology teacher at my school was known for being excellent—he explained concepts clearly, was enthusiastic, and showed students the bigger picture. The other teacher was unanimously considered one of the worst teachers at our school. I had the latter (fun story on this later).

Even though you might not have control over which teacher you get, you'll be able to gauge how much variation there will be in your future.

How do you start doing this?

• Get to know upperclassmen and talk to them about their experiences with classes. Everyone loves griping about school. If you have older siblings, ask them and their friends, or join a club through which you can meet upperclassmen.
• Talk to teachers in advance. Ask honest questions about how to prepare for their classes, what the weekly workload will look like, and how intense students feel the class is. Most teachers will actually appreciate this, as long as you don't keep neurotically bugging them about it.

If you set your expectations correctly for the future, you'll be prepared to weather the storm.

#3: Be Ruthlessly Efficient With Your Time

This is probably my most important piece of advice in this section.

There is one limitation in every human's life, from Bill Gates' and Mark Zuckerberg's to yours and mine. It's the time you have per day. Everyone has only 24 hours in a day, and it's up to you to get the most out of each day.

If you're aiming for a top college, building a strong application will likely take up almost all your free time. Roughly speaking, out of 24 hours in a weekday, you have eight hours for school and transit (which are mandatory), eight hours for life outside of school, and eight hours for sleep. (And I do recommend you get sleep—more on that later.)

Of the eight hours you have outside of school, you might need four hours every day to get through your homework and another two for your extracurriculars. This gives you just two hours of free time. Weekends remove the eight hours of schooling but likely replace it with more studying, test prep, and extracurriculars.

When charted like this, it's clear that you have a strictly limited amount of time every day to get through what you need to get through.

Therefore, every hour you can spend or use more efficiently is a huge gain.

Furthermore, if you're able to save an hour every day, you'll be able to get an extra 365 hours per year. This is a massive amount of time you can use to improve your grades or make serious progress on an extracurricular.

The most driven applicants you're competing with will be focused and productive 80% or above all the time. They'll be strongly motivated to do well and often passionate about what they're doing. (Remember what we discussed regarding intrinsic motivation.)

If you're productive at only half this—or 40% of the time—you'll lose out on 3,500 hours of productivity over three years of high school. This is a staggering amount.

We'll talk more about time management below, but there are two high-level points I'd like to make now.

Time Spent on Any Activity Usually Has "Diminishing Marginal Returns"

This means that for each unit of time you put in, the extra value you generate shrinks rapidly.

This is an economics concept that applies to a lot of everyday life.

Notice how at the very beginning, a little bit of effort makes a big impact on results. After a while, each additional unit of effort barely moves the needle on output. Thus "diminishing marginal returns."

A common time drain is social time or hanging out. If you haven't seen your friends all day, then the first 10 minutes you see them are going to be super exciting. You'll share the latest news and gossip and find out more about each other's lives.

By the end of the first hour, though, you'll often run out of things to talk about. This is where awkward silences might start settling in and people start focusing on their phones.

By the end of the third hour, you're probably in a zombie-like state in which you're hanging out but not really doing anything in particular. You could have packed things up two and a half hours ago and spent the rest of that time doing something more effective.

The same goes for texting, Snapchat, Netflix, and browsing the internet, as far as your happiness is concerned. The first little bit goes a long way, but the rest of the time doesn't add all that much.

The trap here is that all these activities are pretty pleasant and pain-free compared to running a marathon or studying. Like a warm blanket in winter, they're easy to get lost in and hard to escape from. It takes real discipline and willpower to break out of that trap and do hard things like study for a test.

Surprisingly, diminishing returns applies equally to classwork. There really is a point at which studying more isn't going to raise your score and you're just obsessing for no real reason. There's a point at which spending more time polishing an essay isn't going to get you a higher grade on it.

If you're a perfectionist like I was, you might obsess over every last detail. You have to recognize when good enough is good enough, and extra units of time aren't actually adding to the quality of your work.

Surprisingly, a 4.0 isn't about perfection in every single aspect of coursework. This is really stressful and difficult. It's about doing a good enough job everywhere and getting the most for the least.

Find Opportunities for Wasted Time and Spent It on More Useful Things

With the concept of diminishing returns above in mind, you should examine where you're spending your time and question the value you get out of every extra half hour you spend on it. This really extends to all aspects of your life.

Largely speaking, your life will be include school, homework, extracurriculars, test prep, social time, and family time. Some of these will be really important to your college application, while others won't be.

If a major goal of your high school life is to get into the best college you can, then you need to structure your life around maximizing your chance of success.

There are a couple of common time sinks that don't end up contributing to your college application as much as you think they do.

Time Sink #1: Time-consuming, ineffective extracurriculars. Typically, extracurriculars will take up the most time outside of coursework. Certain activities take up a ton of time but aren't very impressive to the top colleges if you're not performing at an elite level. I'd like to single out a few common ones:

• Playing an instrument and in an orchestra/marching band: A serious musician might practice one to two hours a day. Being in a marching band might add an hour per day on average. Over three years, this will add up to thousands of hours. If you are not a section leader of a well-known group or a national-level performer, this experience does not add significantly to your application. Sorry to be blunt. Imagine the many thousands of orchestras and marching bands in the country, all with concertmasters, drum majors, and section first chairs. If you are rank and file, you will not stand out, but you will spend a lot of time on not standing out.
• Volunteering: Some students think that 1,000 hours of volunteering service is a lot more impressive than 200 hours. It's not—especially if you're doing something straightforward like delivering hospital samples or serving front line at a soup kitchen. You can get "credit" for volunteering with just, say, an hour per week. Again, hundreds of thousands of students volunteer across the country—it's just not that special unless you make it special .
• Athletics: Sports practices and games are grueling and can take up to two hours on average per day. Plus, when you get home at the end of the day, you might be too tired to maintain your willpower and do your schoolwork efficiently. If you're not good enough to be recruited for your sport or earn meaningful distinctions at the state level or above, it's really not that impressive. Once again, imagine how many hundreds of thousands of varsity athletes there are across the country, and imagine how you fit into this crowd.

As you can see, the pattern is that it's easy to spend time on activities that are very common, very time-consuming, and very indistinguishable from what everyone else is doing.

Time Sink #2: Hard classes you don't need to take. As I mentioned above, you really don't need to take AP Biology if it's especially hard for you. It's easy to get caught up in what everyone else is doing, but you don't have to play the same game. If you drop AP Biology, you might be able to take two AP courses in other subjects you like more.

If you're participating in one of these activities, dropping it can free up hundreds of hours a year. This is a massive amount of time.

Here's what you can do with this bulk of free time:

• Get your grades up: If you historically find yourself short on time to do homework and test prep of the highest quality, you'll be able to devote more time to doing a better job in school.
• Pursue a deep interest and make notable achievements: This is more impressive to college admissions committees than typical activities and will benefit you personally as you explore developing passions.
• Spend that time doing things that truly make you happier: If you're really stressed out all the time, chances are you're spending time on something that's not making you happy or adding much to your college application. Dropping it will be a breath of fresh air.

A clear exception to the rule above is if you really enjoy your activity. If you really really like volleyball but only play at junior-varsity level, then keep on doing it. Happiness is important, and it's usually better to be happy and un-optimized than miserable and optimized.

In all other cases, it's just silly to do one of these activities at a mediocre level at the expense of schoolwork or other helpful things.

I know this analysis sounds pretty intense, but it's super important, and not enough students actually take a step back and evaluate why they're doing what they're doing.

It's also a really good life skill—you're never going to have more time in the day, and when you get into college and your career, getting the most out of each hour will put you ahead of most people.

So that you're not worried about becoming a robot, I admit that I'm nowhere near perfect 100% efficiency throughout my day. In high school, I spent time every day chatting online with friends and playing computer games. These were my ways of unwinding.

However, I rarely ever let this "wasted" time expand beyond an hour per day, often because I gave it to myself as a reward after finishing all my homework. (Remember diminishing marginal returns.) My parents also were pretty effective moderators of this, sometimes disconnecting our internet at night so I wouldn't stay up til 2 am chatting about stupid stuff.

Again, the most important piece of advice I have in this section is to analyze everything you're doing and decide whether it's worth it. If you spend your time correctly, like what I suggest in my guide on getting into Harvard , this will put you far ahead of most of your classmates.

#4: Know When Every Assignment Is Due and Plan, Plan, Plan

For a sane life, you need to know precisely when major tests and papers are due, and when every homework assignment is due.

You then need to plan ahead and budget enough time for each assignment. You need to notice when you're ahead or behind in your schedule for each of your classes and adjust your time so you can catch up.

This is essentially like having five parallel pipelines going on at any one time:

A Gantt chart , a common project management technique. More hardcore than you need, but used here for illustration.

If you know you need a full week to write a good essay, plan for this. Start a full week ahead of when it's due, and not any later.

If you know you need 15 hours to study for an AP Biology test, budget the time for that every day.

I suggest using Google Calendar or the iCloud Calendar for this. You can color code categories of work like homework, projects, and tests. You can also set alerts for things you tend to forget.

You want to be a machine and aim for full preparation for everything you're responsible for.

You should treat any surprises or last-minute work as a failure of planning. These increase your stress and lower the quality of your work. No last-minute homework crunch of quiz studying should be happening.

I know that all-nighters are, in rare cases, necessary, but they should not be a common occurrence. While it might be fun to bond with friends over pulling an all-nighter for a paper, take a step back and realize what that says: "I didn't plan well enough to budget enough time for this assignment, even though I've already done 20 of them. It was physically and mentally painful, and most likely lowered the quality of my work."

The better thing to do is to have that paper ready a whole day before it's due and have it so rock solid that you're sure it's going to get you an A.

Here are a few effective scheduling tips:

• Do a regular weekly and monthly review of your schedule to plan ahead: Get your parents involved since they can help enforce your planned schedule and deadlines.
• Prioritize your work correctly: Assignments that take up a bigger portion of a class's grade are more important. Classes that you're doing worse in need more critical attention. You should be dynamic and adjust to the circumstances. Do not just focus your attention on assignments you like more or that are easier for you.
• Know when to cut your losses for now and move on: It's easy to get stuck in a rut and spin your wheels without making progress. Move onto something else for now and come back to the assignment later. When you come back, you'll likely have a new perspective and get unstuck.

Again, since you're going to be spending at least 100 hours per month on homework, you might as well spend an hour a month guiding where that time will be spent.

#5: Don't Prioritize Other Things Over Sleep

Now, sleep. There seems to be an epidemic of high school students regularly sleeping very late at night—say, past midnight—and having to wake up at 7 am or earlier. They then need to get triple shot espressos every few hours to make it through the day.

This sounds crazy to me.

It's universally accepted that teens should be getting eight to 10 hours of sleep every night . When I was in high school, I regularly slept from 11 pm to 7 am, without fail.

I remember this clearly because in senior year, I had to stay up till 2 am working on a group English project that we'd all procrastinated on. This stood out to me because I'd rarely ever stayed up that late.

And yet, with eight hours of sleep every day, I was still able to pack everything in. (Remember what I said above about being ruthless with effectively using your time.)

Sleep has a huge impact on your performance and happiness.

Worse, it affects you in an insidious way—you'll think more slowly and less creatively. Essentially, a vicious cycle happens: you fall asleep later, making you less efficient and making your homework take longer to do.

If you're not getting enough sleep, you need to examine where you're spending your time and be sure that every hour you're spending on something is really worth it. I would bet something does exist that you can cut out.

There's probably some combination of an intense coursework schedule, a demanding school, and intense extracurriculars that make it extra hard to carve out more time. But I'm sure at least one of two things is happening:

• There's a lot of time spent on an activity that isn't actually worthwhile for college admissions or
• There's ample time being wasted somewhere else (we covered both above)

I can also guess that something dumb is happening: sleeping late is now considered a badge of honor, especially at uber-competitive high schools. If you're around hardworking students, people likely brag often about getting only four hours of sleep. Pounding Red Bulls visibly is something to be proud of. They might even be tempted to share this on Instagram, timed perfectly at 3 am.

This is silly because it incentivizes the opposite of what you want—it rewards you for being inefficient, not efficient. In fact, people who do this probably waste time during the afternoon because they want to sleep late. Sounds crazy, doesn't it?

You should aim for the opposite—do really well and make it look easy. (If people don't actually do this, I apologize as I'm an old man now and out of touch with you teens.)

Here are tips to get more sleep:

• Enforce a sleep deadline every day , like 11 pm, so that you can get up by 7 am to get ready for school. Force yourself to lie in bed, not grab your phone and burrow under the covers. If you have to break this deadline, make sure you have a good reason for doing so.
• Cut caffeine six hours before your scheduled bedtime. After that point, drinking caffeine can have serious effects on the quality of your sleep . I see people in Starbucks at 9 pm and have no idea how they sleep at night. If you need caffeine to stay awake from 5 pm to 11 pm, you're probably not getting enough sleep at night!
• Cut the use of electronic screens on phones, tablets, and monitors before sleep. Blue light from screens disrupts your circadian rhythm by tricking your body into thinking it's daylight when it's not. You can also install software that changes the color of your screen to a warmer color. Flux is great for desktops and laptops, and Twilight for Android. iPhones offer a free Night Shift mode you can access through the Settings app.
• If you have a habit of wasting too much time before bed (like me), then strictly enforce your deadline again.

Up to this point, we've discussed high-level strategy. This sounds like general life advice, which is appropriate given that since you're a student, school is a major part of your life.

If you want to get a 4.0 GPA, you'll need to master your life habits and psychology.

I can't repeat enough that you need a solid foundation on top of which to build your studying and classwork. If you don't have this, you'll end up like those unfortunate students who take on heavy course loads and flounder for years, getting five hours of sleep a night, feeling miserable, and not making it into their target schools.

This is a recipe for academic discontent and disillusionment. It's like trying to build a house on quicksand.

Instead, you want to build a fortress on bedrock. After reading this guide, take the time to review all the important notes and reflect on whether you feel like you're executing them well. You might even do this every semester to make sure you're on track to your 4.0.

Section 3: General Class Strategy

With the high-level stuff covered, we'll now get into the thick of it: how to get straight As in your actual classes. This section will cover general class strategies that apply to every single class you take, regardless of subject. Section 4 will then cover strategies for individual subjects like math and English.

#1: Understand How the Class Is Graded

At the beginning of the year, every teacher makes clear how the class will be graded. This varies tremendously from subject to subject and teacher to teacher, and it's important to understand where you should be spending your time to get the best results.

There are two important pieces to this:

How Are Different Components of Your Work Weighted in Your Final Grade?

Commonly, this means a distribution across homework and projects, test scores, and participation. Different teachers have different weightings. Often, science and math classes focus on tests, while English classes focus on essays and projects.

You need to prepare a strategy for each course to do well on whatever is maximized. A simple rule of thumb is that you should spend a proportional amount of time depending on how much it contributes to your grade.

If a class is 50% tests, 40% homework, and 10% participation, you should split your time for that class accordingly. In this case, you could get away with minimal class participation as long as you ace the tests and homework.

Sometimes this can be deceiving—some teachers might give little weight to homework and more to tests, for example (this is almost always the case in college courses).

But it's often difficult to do well on tests without the regular commitment to homework, so you should spend that time on homework even if it doesn't contribute to your grade.

What's the Grading Scale—Is It Curved? Or Is It Based on an Absolute Scale on Test Scores?

Curved scales are rare in high schools, likely because they lead to unwanted competition. But if your class is curved, you need to pay attention to where you're positioned in the class, rank-wise, and you need to give yourself extra wiggle room in case the curve on a test is particularly tough.

If, instead, the class is graded on an absolute scale, like 93%+ is an A and the tests aren't curved, you can focus more on your own performance. This also makes planning more predictable—if you're at an 87% and need to pull yourself up to a 93%, you can figure out what your remaining homework and test scores have to be to get an A.

#2: Learn How to Learn

Learning is a mysterious process. You probably don't remember how you learned to walk or talk. When you memorize something, you can recall that fact some time later, even though you don't really know what is actually happening in your brain.

Even at the frontier of research, the nature of how we learn is still pretty mysterious.

Regardless, there are still a couple of principles of learning that have been provably effective.

Imagine Your Knowledge as a Tree

To build a tree, first you need strong roots and a trunk—these are the foundational concepts of the subject. Then, you build the branches and the leaves—these are the smaller details you're often tested on.

If you don't have a trunk, you won't have anything for your branches to grow on. So when you learn something, really focus on the fundamental core of what you're learning—the core that underlies all the little details. (I got this analogy from Elon Musk , the well-known entrepreneur behind SpaceX and Tesla Motors.)

For an example from calculus, let's take the concept of derivatives. On a test, you'll often get a function and be asked to find the derivative of it. Different functions behave in different ways; the derivative of 2 x 2 is 4 x , but the derivative of sin( x ) is cos( x ). These often require memorization, and the details are the leaves of the tree.

The trunk of the tree is the fundamental idea behind what a derivative is: when you take a derivative of a function, what you're doing is defining the rate of change along the function. At any particular point, the rate of change is equal to the slope of the line tangent to the function at that point.

Derivatives, one of the most important concepts of calculus. If you're nowhere near taking calculus, don't worry about the details just yet.

When you understand this trunk, then every derivative formula afterward makes intuitive sense. You'll be able to absorb new formulas —new branches and leaves—much more easily since you just add them to the trunk.

But if you don't understand this trunk, you'll find yourself struggling to memorize the details piecemeal, as if you're making a shoddy quilt.

This is also true in the humanities. When you learn how to write an essay in English or history, look beyond just following the standard essay template given by your teacher. Here's what you need to understand:

• The thesis-evidence-conclusion structure is an effective way to make an argument because you prepare the reader for what you're going to say, prove it using evidence, and then recap the important takeaway points.
• When you cite textual evidence from a book, you need to relate it back to your thesis to make clear how the evidence supports or proves your point.
• Transitions between paragraphs and within paragraphs help the reader piece together all your disparate points into a cohesive whole.

Once you build this trunk, the details of how to do this with actual words and phrases will come naturally. If you don't build your trunk, you'll become frustrated with following someone else's instructions without knowing why.

When you learn something, really try to ask yourself what the root of what you're learning is. Once you identify this, the details will come more naturally to you. Many teachers don't teach this way, so it's up to you to do it yourself.

Constantly Relate New Things You're Learning to Things You Already Know

When I visualize how knowledge works, I imagine a network of nodes connected to each other. Each node is a unit of information—a math formula, a concept, or a historical fact.

When two nodes are connected, I see them as related to each other. Two linked nodes might be the area of a circle and the perimeter of a circle, for example.

How I visualize my knowledge: each circle is a concept or fact, and lines connect related concepts.

Some nodes are heavily connected to each other. Some nodes hang on only by a thread.

Nodes that are weakly linked and not accessed often tend to be forgotten much more quickly. Intuitively, this makes sense: if a particular concept is related to other concepts, every time you recall one of the related concepts, you'll have a better chance of activating the related concepts. This then cements all the concepts around.

I know this is very abstract, so let's use an example. In US History, you'll learn about three core events: the Revolutionary War, the Civil War and slavery abolishment, and women's suffrage.

The brute-force way to learn about these events is to memorize the facts and details for each event, as though each were in its own independent vacuum. After all, you're likely taught and tested unit by unit, so this is the natural way to learn.

But in reality, there are key themes that tie these events together:

• Over time, the subjugated tend to earn their freedom: In the Revolutionary War, American colonists were under the dominion of the British government until they won their independence. In the Civil War, slavery was a contentious issue that eventually led to its abolition and the freedom of slaves. In regard to women's suffrage, women earned the right to vote equally as men. This trend continues to hold true today with gay marriage rights.
• For each event, key leaders spoke for the masses and represented their will: Select examples of these include the founding fathers for the Revolutionary War, Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass for the Civil War, and Susan B. Anthony for women's suffrage.
• For each event, there was opposition that tried to maintain the status quo: This would be the British, the South, and society at large, respectively. (Both men and women opposed women's suffrage.)

I'm not a history buff so apologies for this complete simplification.

These unifying themes help you see the patterns among these important events. When you learn about Abraham Lincoln, you can relate his achievements to those of George Washington, strengthening your understanding of both.

Now, these events are clearly tremendously different from each other, but defining contrasts is just as helpful. During the Revolutionary War and the fight for women's suffrage, the main instigators were those being subjugated—the colonists and women. In contrast, in the Civil War, the action was more strongly led by white men in the Union and less so by the slaves themselves.

Defining these contrasts still develops a connection among the events, in turn leading to a stronger understanding of both. It also helps you ask interesting questions about why these events differed from each other.

You can see how altogether you're building this interconnected network of events. When you learn world history, you'll be able to fit the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the end of colonization, and other events into this framework.

This rich, multi-dimensional network-building is a stark contrast to the usual way history is taught—as a one-dimensional timeline. The one-dimensional way was how I was taught history and it made history a pretty boring collection of historical facts, which is a shame because learning could be so much more interesting and effective.

If you can focus on building a strong trunk of knowledge and connecting what you learn to what you already know, you'll be able to learn much more effectively.

#3: Understand How Teachers Think, and Give Them What They Want

If learning is your job, your teacher is your boss. Your responsibility is to follow the teacher's guidelines and give the teacher what she wants. Your performance will then determine whether you get a promotion (an A) or get fired (an F).

This can be intimidating, but it doesn't have to be. Even though teachers might seem like imposing vanguards of knowledge, in reality they're humans, with ambitions and flaws like everyone else.

By understanding how a teacher thinks, you'll be able to customize your approach to the class to increase your chances of performing well in it. This is especially important in subjective pieces such as essay grading, group projects, and class participation.

There's a huge variation in the types of teachers you'll have. Some teachers are veterans—they've seen it all and won't put up with your whining. Others are new—they're still trying to figure it out, really want to do a good job, and crave approval from students.

Some teachers are passionate, want to connect with students, and achieve carpe diem moments daily. Others are perfunctory and just want kids to keep quiet and cause less trouble in their lives so they can go home and watch The Walking Dead .

Some teachers want lively class discussions and want to see students inspire each other. Others run class like a prison—no outbursts, or you get solitary.

The more you understand how a teacher thinks, the more you can give the teacher what she wants. This might sound sociopathic and calculating, but in reality it's a social skill you already use without thinking much about it. It's also a skill you'll be using throughout your life, from college applications to job applications and work.

Here are some general principles I've found to be true of most teachers.

Most Teachers Do, at Their Core, Care a Lot About Their Job

They chose education as their craft for a reason, usually because they like the idea of inspiring students and contributing to their growth.

They also care about the subject matter—if they teach math, they find math interesting. If they teach history, they find history interesting. Grizzled veteran teachers might be disillusioned by this because maybe their kids have historically sucked, but they're still open to being surprised and inspired by the young people they teach.

What does this suggest?

Most teachers hate students whose sole concern is getting a good grade and who make this desire clear from their questions and behavior.

Most teachers love students who sincerely care about the class material and show curiosity. They love passing on their subject matter knowledge to students, filling the jar of the student's mind.

One place this is clear is in the syllabi that teachers write for classes. You might not know that AP courses at every high school are audited by the College Board for curricular soundness, and teachers are required to submit their syllabi for approval. Here's a real example from a teacher for AP English Language:

This lesson plan is an X-ray into the thinking of the teacher; it clearly describes the meaningful skills students are expected to learn, and the teacher's enthusiasm is palpable. While this is probably an example of an above-average teacher, it illustrates how teachers who care really do understand what they're teaching and what they want students to get out of it.

If you can prove to the teacher you're learning what she wants you to learn, you'll be in amazing shape.

Most Teachers See the Students They Teach as the Future Generation of Society

You are the future, so teachers want to see admirable qualities in their students. You'll be liked if you're honest, take responsibility for your mistakes, contribute positively to the class, and work hard. You'll be disliked if you're sneaky or dishonest, disrupt the classroom, act arrogantly, or blame others for your mistakes.

Be the kind of person teachers would like to entrust the future to.

Most Teachers Already Have a Lot of Work to Do

Teaching requires a huge time commitment. After school ends, teachers have to grade homework at night and plan for the next school day. Some of them supervise extracurriculars. This can mean an effective workday of 7 am to 6 pm.

If you cause more trouble and add to the teacher's load, this will be annoying.

If, instead, you can offer ways to lighten the teacher's load and solve his problems, he'll love you.

Why does all of this actually matter?

Understanding how the teacher thinks is critical to getting good grades on assignments, tests, and participation. On a history test, does the teacher care more about the big picture or about reciting minute historical facts? In an English essay, does the teacher care about executing a standard template well, or about having a novel point of view? What skills and concepts does the teacher really want to see in this essay?

If you approach your classes from the teacher's perspective, you'll be able to customize your work to what the teacher expects. We'll talk more about this later.

Another significant way this will improve your class performance is to communicate with the teacher more reliably. Given the same issue, you can present it in a way that'll make the teacher hate you, or in a different way that'll make the teacher admire your maturity and resolve.

Let's say you didn't do well on a test. An annoying student would say something like this:

"Ms. Robinson, I got a B on this test. I studied really hard and some of the questions were unfair. You didn't tell us they were going to be on the test. Also, I've been really busy with orchestra and volunteering—other students don't have these responsibilities. Is there any way I can get my test regraded? Can I get extra credit?"

Gag. This is nails on a chalkboard for a teacher. You get anti-brownie points. Poop points. I've overheard this often during high school and even in college.

Here's a better way to approach your teacher:

"I got a B on this test, even though I spent a lot of time studying, and I wanted to see if you could help. I'm not here to ask for more points; I just want to improve for the future.

I feel like I have a problem with the way I'm studying. For example, before the test I felt really confident with this kind of question, but on the test I made this mistake and I'm not sure why. Also, I tried to be thorough in my studying, but I missed the sections that were tested in these questions.

Do you have any suggestions?"

Let's contrast the two options. In the first one, you blame the teacher and your schedule, not yourself. You put the focus on the grade rather than the learning. Finally, you try to get an unfair advantage over other students without contributing anything yourself. This type of response is pretty typical because, to be fair, your goals are really important to you and it's tempting to try to get easy points where you can. (Also, you're young and more likely to think the world revolves around you.)

The second option is a 180 on the first. You put the emphasis on improving yourself, not on the grade. You own up to your mistakes rather than blaming other people. Before the meeting, you've done your homework by reflecting on where you might have fallen short rather than expecting the teacher to fix all your problems while you sit back. You also make it an open conversation in which the teacher can use her expertise to ask questions and dig more deeply.

These kinds of interactions make a world of difference in how teachers perceive you. It's unlikely teachers will actually give you an unfair advantage in grading, but it will make your life easier. You'll be treated with more respect and understanding. Teachers will work harder to help you. In cases wherein you need more flexibility, the teacher might be more likely to accommodate you. It'll also ultimately lead to strong letters of recommendation for your college applications .

Now, I'm not talking about sycophantic brown-nosing. You should be sincere and not just act the part. Teachers have seen a lot, and it's easier than you think to detect insincerity. One common way to sniff out a fake is to ask more questions and dig a little more deeply. If you haven't actually analyzed your test, for example, when the teacher asks you how you studied and what you think your mistakes were, you'll come up short. It'll then be clear you're just mouthing words, and the teacher will lose trust in you.

Take some time to think through classes you're struggling in or teachers you don't get along with. Do you understand what the teacher's expectations are? Why aren't you meeting them, and what can you do to improve this?

#4: Develop Strong Study and Homework Habits

Over the course of high school, you'll likely spend more than 3,000 hours on schoolwork and studying.

This is a lot of time. If you can make a 10% improvement on this by spending 20 hours learning really good study strategy, it'll be well worth your time. (This is what's known as "high leverage"—you put in a little to get a lot.)

Here are a few guidelines I think every student should follow.

Study Habit 1: Focus on Effectiveness and Efficiency

When you get into the thick of high school, you start taking a lot of things for granted. Each math homework assignment will take about an hour. Studying for a history test might take eight hours. An essay all included might take 15 hours.

Rather than taking things for granted, you should be continuously evaluating whether you're spending the right amount of time on your work. How long is homework taking? Why?

What is your time distribution across all the activities that go into doing homework? Is anything less effective than you thought it was? Can you experiment with restructuring your time so that you get better results for less time? (This connects to the "being ruthless with your time spent" point above).

As an extreme question, can you cut your total time down by 50% while maintaining the same level of quality? Why or why not? I ask my employees this all the time, and while it's not usually strictly possible, it helps illuminate what things can be cut with little effect on the outcome.

By going through this analysis, you'll be able to partition your time spent into effective and ineffective components. If you can axe the ineffective parts, you'll save a lot of time without affecting the quality of your work.

At the end of this reflection, you might find that there's really nothing better you can do and you just need to keep chugging along. This can be true, but you have to be honest with yourself and give yourself enough time to give this serious consideration. You should also experiment with alternatives or improvements and reflect on whether you've improved or declined.

Remember, there's always a time-quality tradeoff curve. Get the most for the least. Avoid perfectionism. Understand how much you need to do to get a great score, and when each unit of time is no longer returning you sufficient results, spend that time elsewhere.

Study Habit 2: Put Away Your Phone, Turn Off Your Computer, Eliminate Distractions

There's homework time and there's relaxation time. Clearly compartmentalize both. Do not mix the two.

When you're doing homework, do it at 100% effort.

You're nowhere near as good at multitasking as you think you are . Focus on one thing, and then focus on another.

Recently, I went to a coffee shop and watched a college student at the table next to me try to study chemistry while using her phone. It was painful to watch: she'd read a page for two minutes, get a text, respond to it, and then browse Facebook for five minutes. Overall, it took her an hour to get through three pages.

She likely wasn't super motivated to study to begin with (hence why I started this guide with that high-level principle), but the bad study habits guarantee she's wasting her time. Not only was she getting nowhere with her studying, but she also probably wasn't enjoying texting and browsing Facebook all that much either. A lose-lose.

If you really have a problem with this, I suggest timing yourself just to see how much time you're wasting. Get a chess clock and force yourself to time yourself when you're studying and when you're using your phone.

If you need to use the computer while you work, there are browser tools such as RescueTime that track what websites you've visited and for how long. You can see how much time you're spending researching and how much time you're spending just watching YouTube.

You can also block distracting websites for a certain period of time. This way you can ensure that 6-8 pm will stay English-essay work time—not 20% English essay/80% YouTube time.

Study Habit 3: Do Homework in School If Possible

A lot of teachers have spare class time or downtime. Typically students just chat with each other until the bell rings. Use that time to do your homework you would otherwise do at night.

I remember AP Computer Science was an easy class. I'd finish assignments within 10 minutes and then work on homework the rest of the hour. In another history class, the teacher's lectures were unhelpful and I was better off just reading the chapter by myself at home. I took that time to work on other homework. (Note that some teachers get really annoyed when you do this, so be careful.)

There's also lunchtime, which is a little less than an hour. Many students sit at the lunch tables and chat until the bell rings. I banded together with a bunch of other nerd friends in the library and just did homework. Social life + homework = killing two birds with one stone.

Every day, this saved me more than two hours of time. When I got home, I'd only have a few hours of homework and studying left, which freed up room for extracurriculars and a few games of Starcraft. (This is also partly why I was able to go to sleep before 11 pm every night, even with my extracurriculars.)

Now, this isn't the coolest thing to do and you might be afraid of looking like a nerd. But if you think it's a good idea, you generally shouldn't lead your life based on what other people think about you anyway.

Study Habit 4: Learn to Deal With Procrastination

Procrastination affects pretty much everyone in multiple aspects of life. Everyone knows that feeling of how much easier it is to put off studying for a test so that you can get an extra half hour to watch Netflix. Before you know it, though, it's time to sleep and you haven't done anything.

We have an excellent guide on why procrastination happens and how to overcome it , in the context of test prep. I highly recommend reading it.

As a summary, procrastination happens when (1) you feel you're in the wrong mood to finish a task, and (2) you assume your mood will change in the near future. This can lead to a vicious cycle wherein you feel guilty for procrastinating, making it even harder to summon the energy to be productive again.

#5: Learn to Ace Tests by Understanding What's Being Tested and How

Tests typically make up the majority of how you're graded in a class. Teachers need a way to assess your knowledge in a standardized way that's hard to cheat on, and tests are the best way (or the least bad way) to do this. Learning how to prepare for tests and how to get great scores reliably is critical to getting straight As.

The most important piece to this is understanding what's being tested (the "content") and how it'll be tested (the "format"—e.g., multiple choice, essay, open-ended questions, etc.). This will directly determine what you study and how you prepare for the test.

You likely already know this intuitively—how you study for a math test is pretty different from how you study for a Spanish test. For math, you run through a lot of practice problems. For Spanish, you memorize vocab and practice grammar rules.

Once you know what you're being tested on and how, you can build your test-study strategy:

Step 1: Understand the test content and format Step 2: Define your test-prep strategy, integrating reading, practice questions, and review Step 3: Execute your study strategy Step 4: Test yourself Step 5: Improve your method and go back to Step 3

The critical piece here is Step 1: understanding what's actually on the test.

Even within the same subject, different teachers have different styles. You and your friend might be taking the same course—say, AP US History—with different teachers but have entirely different tests. Your teacher might emphasize fact memorization and have mainly multiple-choice questions gridded in through scantrons, whereas your friend's teacher might emphasize big-picture concepts and use tests consisting mainly of essays and free responses. The way you prepare for each test is thus very different.

How do you figure out the best way for you to study? Here are four helpful strategies:

Strategy 1: Ask Your Teacher for a Sample Exam From Last Year

Teachers are usually consistent in how they test from year to year, so chances are this year's tests will look a lot like last year's. In college it's common for professors to give access to previous years' exams as practice tests. Good high school teachers will do this because they don't recycle tests and want to give students fair exposure to what the test will be like.

On the other hand, bad teachers will hide previous years' tests because they are lazy, want to recycle the tests, and don't want to give resourceful students an unfair advantage.

Strategy 2: Get Exams From Last Year's Students

If you have friends or know upperclassmen who took the class with that teacher, ask if they've saved their tests. You can set up an exchange among your friends wherein you share materials from classes that others will take in the future. Lazy teachers really hate this because it forces them to write new exams each year, but that's part of their job.

Note that you should of course be careful and avoid allegations of cheating. If you're worried about this, feel free to ask your teacher how he feels about it before you try to get previous year's tests. And, of course, don't do anything dumb like plagiarizing someone's essay.

Strategy 3: Ask Your Teacher What's Going to Be on the Test and How It'll Be Tested

Don't be annoying about this. Remember what I said about giving teachers what they want. Teachers often hate the question, "Is this going to be on the test?" because they can't win. If they say no, students stop paying attention. If they say yes, students won't appreciate the greater meaning of what they're learning. Most teachers really do care about how their students are learning and get excited when they see students with a genuine love of learning.

A more palatable way of doing this is to be proactive. Prepare a high-level overview of content that you believe is on the test, and the format in which it'll be tested. Go to the teacher and ask her to take a quick look. Make it clear that you're asking because you care about doing well on the test and you want to understand the teacher's expectations.

You might even offer to save the teacher time by circulating this to your classmates so that she won't have to talk to 20 different students about what's on the test. (Remember, if you can make the teacher's life easier, she'll love it.)

If you do this earnestly and not in an obviously groveling way, the teacher will typically be more than happy to help because it's clear you care about your education.

Strategy 4: Use Every Previous Test to Infer What Future Tests Will Look Like

Even if you have zero information about the first test and you go in blind, the second test will likely look a lot like the first one. Halfway through the course, you'll be comfortable with how the teacher thinks and be able to predict the tests with high accuracy.

Story Time: My Least Favorite High School Class

The worst class I've ever taken was AP Biology my freshman year of high school. The teacher was a middle-aged man who was profoundly uninspiring.

Every day he'd turn off the lights, sit in front of the class with an overhead projector, and go line by line through the teacher notes provided by the book ( Campbell's Biology ). He would literally just read each bullet point, add a sentence or two, and move on. He had a monotone voice, and half the students treated this class as nap time (though as I suggest above, the smarter thing would've been to work on other homework during this time). Thinking about his inefficacy as a teacher is infuriating to this day.

The worst part of the class was how the tests were created. They were entirely multiple choice and often tested trivia straight from the book. There wasn't really any high-level thinking involved—the only way to do well on them was to memorize each chapter before the test.

I remember the worst question was a trivial fact from the caption of an image —I think it was the species name of a bird—that was totally irrelevant to what we needed to know for genuine understanding. He'd just decided it was a good way to test whether someone had memorized the chapter.

This struck fear into all of us. After bombing the first test, I had to change my approach. I started reading every chapter six times to memorize all the details. I'd highlight details like a madman to make sure I wasn't missing anything that might be tested. I'd create my own quizzes before reading the chapter so I could assess how well I was memorizing the details.

The key point is that I customized how I prepared to the content and the format of the test. My approach would have been totally inappropriate for another AP Biology class, but it was the right one for this class.

Going into the end of the school year, I had an A and was safe. It took a ton of work but I did it. Unfortunately, the teacher realized that because of how crappy of a job he'd done at teaching, the average grade in his class was going to be a C, and he was probably going to get a lot of hate from parents and the administration. He decided at the end of the year to administer a sample AP test that was entirely extra credit.

I was annoyed because I ended up with something like 130% in the class, which is why you see an A+ in my transcript for freshman-year AP Biology, which meant I'd studied unnecessarily hard.

The upside to this was that the actual AP test was super easy because I had literally memorized the entire textbook.

#6: View Your Job as Constant Improvement and Build Feedback Cycles for Yourself

NOTE: This is one of the most important points in this entire guide. I work with so many students who don't understand this and it's killing their potential to improve.

If something you're trying isn't giving you the results you want after a lot of trials, it's clear that you need to reexamine your strategy. If you're cutting broccoli for dinner and you chop off a piece of your finger every night, it's pretty obvious you need to change how you're using the knife (unless you love adding iron to your family's diet).

For some reason, this isn't as obvious in the context of coursework. If you get a C on a test, you might be tempted to believe that if you use the same study methods but just study twice as hard, you'll raise your grade to an A.

If the cause of your poor performance was truly a lack of time, then this can work. You can use my advice above to carve out more time for studying.

But in many cases, this is wishful thinking. It's as though you need to tunnel through a brick wall, and you're trying to get through by pounding your head against it. You're failing to make a dent, but you believe if you pound three times as hard you'll be able to get through it. There's something wrong with this strategy, and you need to understand why you've failed and how you can improve.

I think the reason this is so difficult in the context of coursework is that students don't understand the root cause of why they've failed. If you get a B on an essay, it seems tempting to think that you just need to spend more time researching and writing your essay, but really your weakness might be that you just don't understand the teacher's standards and are playing a totally different ball game.

This is why I stress the importance of the high-level concepts above. If you understand that academic success is a combination of multiple factors—motivation, time management, effective learning, understanding of class grading, teacher expectations, and the actual content—you'll be able to pinpoint your weaknesses more effectively.

If you don't understand these are important, you'll have no idea where to begin.

You should treat every evaluation as an opportunity for reflection and improvement. Remember the growth mindset we discussed above. Every disappointing homework assignment and test gives you a chance to reflect on how you failed and how you'll avoid these mistakes in the future.

We can call this the iteration cycle:

First, you obtain a measurement. This is often a grade on a homework assignment or test. If it's lower than your standards, something needs to change.

Next, you reflect on what happened. Here's a checklist of questions to ask yourself:

• How was the assignment or test graded? What did the teacher expect?
• What did you produce? What was your method of producing it? Try to break down the major pieces of what you did.
• What is the difference between the expectation and what you produced?
• Why did this discrepancy happen? What flaw in your method most strongly contributed to this failure?
• What are you going to change about your method to prevent it from happening again?
• When is the next time you'll be able to evaluate whether this is an improvement?

This is comprehensive and might sound tedious, but it's critical to improvement. In my experience with test prep, this is often the second-biggest barrier that prevents students from improving their test scores (the first is not putting in enough time, period).

Sometimes this analysis can be quick—you forgot to proofread your essay and your grammar mistakes got you points taken off. Clearly, next time you should dedicate time to spellchecking.

On the other extreme, after a lot of reflection you might not even know where to begin. Then you can ask the teacher for help. (Remember what I said above—if you go to the teacher with clear introspection and questions, this will show you really care about your education.)

Take notes on this reflection, especially on your plan for next time. Write this down as a commitment to yourself. The next time you have a chance for evaluation, such as a test or assignment, review these notes and implement your plan.

In the last stage of the cycle, you get your next measurement. If you improved substantially and met your goal, great work—from here on out, you just need to keep doing what you did. If you didn't improve or receded, treat your next iteration cycle even more seriously since your situation has gotten worse and you'll need to try something new to dig yourself out of the hole.

Do this for every class in every semester throughout high school. After you do it a few times it'll be second nature, and you'll do it without even thinking.

As an analogy, this is how you keep your car on the road when driving your car. You get constant visual feedback on where you are on the road. If you veer to the left, you reflect on this and turn the steering wheel to the right. You do this constantly to stay on the road.

When driving, you run constant iteration cycles to stay on the road.

When people first start learning to drive around age 14-15, they're not very accustomed to this feedback loop. They'll go nearly off the road before jerking the steering wheel back in the other direction. Then, they realize they've gone too far and jerk it too far back.

Practiced drivers make significantly smaller adjustments all the time. The next time your parents drive, watch them. You'll see them constantly make tiny adjustments left and right to stay exactly where they want to on the road. Experienced drivers do this automatically, by habit.

In your academic life, you don't want to drive 60 mph off the road. Use feedback to figure out where you are and what adjustments you need to make if you're off track.

As a side note, here's a video of teens getting distracted by their phones and shooting way off the road:

Complete failure to measure -> reflect -> improve.

I can't repeat this enough: this concept of iteration cycles is vital to your academic success.

Many students don't go through this process because they don't realize they need to or don't feel like it's important enough compared to actual studying.

In contrast, I would say this is the most important thing you should do after a test. Between every test you probably spend 20 hours in school and 20 hours on homework. Don't you think it's worth one hour examining your method and thinking about it if you're not doing well?

Don't drive 60 mph off the road.

We've covered a lot of high-level stuff so far. We've talked about the foundations of motivation and determination. We've discussed figuring out how teachers think and how to understand how you'll be tested. We've also covered good study habits and how to iterate on feedback to improve your results.

Now, let's talk about specific subjects, because how you'll treat calculus is very different from how you'll treat history.

Math and Science Classes

Math and science classes are typically the most straightforward classes because the material is very standardized. If you take AP Chemistry, the tests will most likely look like standard chemistry questions, and the labs will look like standard labs. It's the same with calculus and physics—you have a ton of practice problems to work through in your textbook, online, and in supplementary books. Unlike English-essay grading, teachers can't really get too creative or subjective here.

The good news is that you can typically predict with great accuracy how you're doing well before a test. It's easy to prepare your own practice tests, review your mistakes, and understand where your weaknesses are and how you need to improve.

The hard part about math and science is that the concepts build on each other throughout the year. In short, something you learned earlier will directly affect your ability to grasp future concepts.

In physics, for example, if you don't understand how force diagrams work, you'll struggle every step of the way through mechanics. In chemistry, if you don't understand stoichiometry and how to convert units to each other, every calculation will be difficult for you.

This doesn't apply as strongly in other subjects like history, which tends to be composed more of modular units. Even though I mentioned above that you can connect different concepts to build a strong network of knowledge, at the end of the day they don't build on each other as much. You might have flunked the section on the American Revolution, but this doesn't strongly affect how well you'll do on the Civil War section.

Essentially, what you have is exponential growth of knowledge vs linear growth:

In my experience, math and science teachers don't emphasize this enough. They treat learning linearly, but in math and science it's really exponential. If you don't get it right in the beginning and don't fix it, you're screwed for the year because the teacher has already moved on.

So if you get a bad start to a math or science class, you need to double down and repair the holes immediately. If you don't, it'll only get worse. If you start a class way in over your head, consider dropping to a lower level.

Another issue with math and science is that the material tends to be dry since it involves a lot of abstract topics that don't really affect your everyday life. Good teachers will show you how the concepts apply to everyday life. If you're learning about EM waves in physics, for example, you'll also learn how your FM radio works. If you're learning about exponential functions, a teacher might take you through a simulation of compounded interest to show how much money you can make through savings.

I once heard a story about a physics teacher who was lecturing and tossed a ball at a student. The student caught it instinctively—didn't even have to think about it. The teacher said, "What your brain just did is a kinematics calculation. You knew exactly where the ball started, how it was traveling, and where it would end up. That's exactly the point of what we're learning—to mathematically predict how traveling objects will behave." I bet that teacher is awesome because that sounds a lot more interesting than just writing a formula on a whiteboard.

If you lack inspiration in math and science, try to relate what you're learning to the real world and to what you care about. If you're a news junkie, this will help you understand articles and analyses more deeply. If you're an athlete, think about how physics works in your sport. This won't always work and can sound a bit hokey, but sometimes you might be pleasantly surprised.

English and Writing Classes

In my experience the hardest part about English classes is the essay grading. Year by year, the standards you're graded on change, and the teacher's expectations change. Some teachers want you to follow the same formula essay after essay. Others want you to have a "voice" and write with style.

I had a frustrating experience in Honors English when we had to write essays about themes of books we were reading. Most people would write something like "the theme is abandonment." My teacher would draw a big red circle around this and write, "SO WHAT?" But she never explained articulately what she meant by this, even when we asked her.

Eventually, we figured out that the theme statement was supposed to be a concept that required a sentence to explain, not just a single word. This requires you to dig a level deeper, something like "abandonment is crippling to a child's psyche and ripples throughout adulthood." But she never explained it well, and it sometimes felt as if I were helpless at the hands of a merciless tyrant.

In English classes, you have to understand the expectations of your teacher and how he will be grading essays. As I said above, use every chance you have for reflection and iteration. If the teacher lets you submit drafts for review before the final essay, take this super seriously. Give the draft your best work, and if you're confused about any of the teacher's comments, ask about them outside of class.

If you don't do well on an essay, reflect on it, prepare notes, and approach the teacher and ask earnestly where your shortcomings are and how you can improve. (Measure -> Reflect -> Improve)

There are also solid foundations to effective writing, such as writing a clear thesis, using transitions between sections, employing textual evidence to support your points, and using appropriate and effective vocabulary. How to do this well is outside the scope of this article, but these are concepts you've been taught through much of English and can see every day in writing in publications such as The New York Times , The New Yorker , and The Atlantic .

Memorization-Heavy Classes, Like History and Foreign Languages

Some classes rely more heavily on factual recall than others do. In particular, I'm thinking about history classes, for which you need to memorize historical events and figures, and foreign-language classes, for which you need to build up a wide vocabulary.

Many students use flashcards for memorization, but they'll use them ineffectively. They'll just go through the entire stack from beginning to end and repeat.

This is ineffective because you end up spending the same amount of time reviewing words you already know as you do the words you have problems with. What you need to do is bias your time toward the cards you actually struggle with.

The way I do this is what I call the waterfall method of memorization. I describe this here in the context of memorizing vocab for the SAT . You cycle through the cards you don't know much more often than the cards you already know.

For long-term retention, there's also a concept known as spaced-repetition learning that spaces out your learning optimally to increase your recall of information. The idea is that right after you learn something, you should review it quickly thereafter to secure the memory. The next time you review, it can be spaced out further, and the next one even further still. Doing this regularly will lock in knowledge in the long term.

This is in contrast to the usual method of memorization, which is to cram before a test and then forget it until you need it for the final.

Anki is a good tool that does this for you automatically. Quizlet is another popular online flashcard tool where you can upload your own flashcards or use other people's flashcards.

As I mentioned above, try to find connections between things you're learning, and look for patterns. Connect historical events to each other. See foreign-language grammar rules as fitting a pattern, and notice when rules deviate from that pattern. This will make learning more interesting and help you understand concepts better.

Group Projects

This isn't a specific class, but it's a common enough issue that it's worth discussing. You'll inevitably have group projects, which means your fate is no longer 100% in your hands.

If you have a choice of partners, try to choose people who you know will do a good job. These are people who work hard and care about their grades. Friends might not be the best option if they're dead weight and you have to end up carrying them. Make it clear to the friend that it's not personal—you just don't feel you work well together. If the friend ends up dissolving your friendship because she expects you to lift her up, and it's not because you're being a jerk about it, then the friendship probably wasn't that strong to begin with.

If you don't get a choice of partners and the teacher just assigns you a group, you'll have to make do with what you have. Teachers are rarely sympathetic to complaints about your team, and it's unlikely you'll be able to change your partners. If anything, be flattered if you get paired with weaker students—the teacher might believe you'll be a positive influence on them.

Once your group is set, focus on getting a good job done. Treat it with the same care and planning as you would your own work, and don't be afraid to take charge if there hasn't been any action. Here are some tips for dealing with group projects:

• Write up the tasks that need to be done and split the work among group members. Ideally, you want to pair the tasks with people's natural skills and interests since this will maximize the overall quality of your project.
• Set up a timeline for milestones your group should hit. Make sure the group agrees on the plan and understands the details.
• Be prepared for timelines to be broken and think about what you'll do in those cases.
• Don't be afraid to take charge if there hasn't been any action.

Don't get hung up on inequality. There's sometimes that one dude who is a complete flake and never gets his job done, and you end up having to cover his ass. Don't sweat it. Focus on the big picture: your grade.

Redistribute his work to the rest of the team and revise the plan, and once again make sure the team agrees on the overall plan. Yes, the slacker might end up with a good grade riding on your backs, but he's also probably screwed for his individual assignments and for other classes. Karma works its way.

If there was anything really frustrating about the group project, you might tell the teacher. As I've said repeatedly above, the messaging to the teacher matters a lot. The teacher does not want to hear you whine about not getting a better grade because of your team. The teacher does not want to hear excuses.

The teacher does want to know of any potential problems and ways she can improve the classroom experience.

Here's an example of a bad way to talk to your teacher about a problem with your group project:

"It's unfair we got a B because of Taylor. She was supposed to do her part of the project but dropped out halfway through and we all paid for it. She should get a C and we should get an A. I didn't even want her on our team, but we didn't have a choice. Can I get a better grade?"

And here's a better way to approach your teacher:

"I wanted to let you know how our group project went since this might be helpful for our future projects. First off, I want to say that I'm not arguing for a better grade—as a group, we all share responsibility for how we did, and we deserve our grade.

So here's the story: when we started our project, we clearly divided up the work and everyone agreed on a timeline. Halfway through at our group meeting, though, Taylor said she was busy with tennis and promised to get more work done. We were all done with our parts and trusted her, which was a mistake. We ended up finding out two days before the project was due that she still hadn't done anything. We scrambled and tried to pitch in, but we were all busy so we didn't produce our best work.

I thought I'd share this story with you for future projects in case it's helpful. You should ask for her side of the story if you're interested."

This takes a totally different approach. First, you make clear that you're not arguing for a better grade upfront —this makes the teacher less suspicious of your motives, thereby encouraging her to listen to your story more intently.

Then, you present the facts, without emotional bias, and accept responsibility for your actions. You tell the teacher why this might be useful, and you exude enough maturity to suggest that you yourself might be biased so she should hear from Taylor's perspective, too.

In the worst case, the teacher ignores you. In the best case, the teacher might reconsider giving the team a bad grade if she finds out how negligent or manipulative the disappointing student was.

Don't Ignore the Easy Classes

In middle school, when I was a chubby kid, I got a B in PE.

Yep. I didn't know this was possible at the time, either.

It turns out the PE teacher gave everyone a set of physical exams—push-ups, sit-ups, stretches, and mile-run time—tallied up your points, and then gave you a grade. I did pretty poorly on all of them and ended up with a B.

You can see how many of my above rules I failed:

• I didn't have the motivation to do well since I didn't think I wouldn't get an A.
• I didn't understand early on how the class was actually going to be graded.
• Given chances for iteration cycles, I didn't reflect enough on my shortcomings and thus didn't change my method of preparing for the exams.

I freaked out and made sure I knew how PE would be graded in high school. I ran my little chubby butt off. In high school, they graded mainly on participation and attendance, so I ended up fine.

Don't let yourself miss an easy A. Understand how all of your classes are graded, even the ones that everyone thinks they'll get an A in. If you get on the bad side of your orchestra teacher, you might be surprised with your final grade.

Again, don't be a jerk about this by marching to the teacher and exclaiming, "I want to know how I can get an A in this class." Make it clear that you just want to meet the teacher's expectations and understand what exactly those are.

We've covered a lot already. Here are some last-minute pieces of advice, and then we'll wrap up with some summary points and a checklist for your academic health.

Tip 1: Get Some Objective Assistance

When you get as involved in something as coursework, it can be hard to take a step back and truly understand your shortcomings. An artist might not be the best critic of her own work.

If you have parents who care about your success and are willing to help out, send this guide to them and discuss it with them once they've read it. Talk about what parts you agree with and what skills you want to improve. Give them your goals and action plan for your high school career, each academic year, and each course. Inform them about your iteration cycles so that they can contribute new ideas about where you went wrong and how you can improve.

More importantly, don't get upset at them and accuse them of nagging when they try to help out according to the way you agreed. This just makes everyone miserable.

If your parents aren't interested in helping, find a friend who cares as much as you do about education and college, and hold each other to task. Even if you feel competitive with this friend in regard to getting into college, you'll likely lift each other to greater heights than where you would be individually.

Tip 2: Know the Trouble Signs and Act

High school can be stressful, especially if your goals are high. Not only are you preparing a strong college application, but you're also navigating the high school social scene, figuring out what you want to do in your life, and navigating your relationship with your parents. Sometimes all things come to a head, and it can be overwhelming.

Recognize trouble signs, reflect on whether they're serious problems, and act quickly if they are. Here are some important questions to ask yourself intermittently:

Are you deeply unhappy? Does every day feel like a slog to you and you're not sure why you're doing any of it? Think about the root cause of this feeling. Maybe your parents are pushing you toward a goal you don't identify with. Maybe there are conflicting aspects to your life—being better at school might mean getting ostracized socially, so you're caught in the middle. Try to reflect on this, identify any plausible root causes, and take steps to address them. (Easier said than done, I know, but you have to start somewhere.)

Are you getting seven to eight hours of sleep a night? If not, restructure your life so you get more output in less time. Chart out where your time goes every day and every week, and observe where there are possibilities for large improvements. This might mean cutting current activities and refocusing that time on something more helpful to your application.

Is one class dragging down the others? Are you spending a lot of time trying to stay afloat in one class, at the expense of your other grades? Consider dropping the course. The earlier you can detect this problem, the more easily you can avoid getting a permanent "Withdrawn" mark on your transcript. But even if it's too late to avoid this, dropping it is still preferable to failure across the board.

Finally, don't be too proud to ask for help. More people are willing to help you than you think—you just haven't asked yet. If you lack supportive parents or friends, seek help from your teachers and counselors. It might take some time and multiple tries to find someone to advocate for you, but one likely exists somewhere in your world.

If you suspect even a bit that you might have mental health concerns, seek help immediately. Again, more people are willing to help than you might think.

Tip 3: Prepare for Crunch Periods—Finals and APs

The end of each semester and academic year is typically pretty stressful. Instead of a staggered timeline, you'll get final exams in most classes all at once. Even worse, you might also have to prep separately for AP exams and the SAT / ACT .

The good news is that if you've built a strong foundation throughout the rest of the year, you're already 80% there before you study for finals. You might have forgotten some details, but the foundational tree trunks are still around. Preparing for the final is now simply a matter of loading the info into your short-term memory for recall.

If you're learning a lot of new material for a final, you're too late. Try the best you can, but next time focus on sustained effort throughout the school year.

As for AP Courses, usually getting an A in class will lead to a pretty easy 5, unless your class is really easy and A is the most common grade. Preparing for standardized tests uses the same skills and principles, no matter if it's an AP test or the SAT. I cover these principles in more detail in my guide on how to get a perfect SAT score .

Tip 4: Rinse and Repeat

High school is four years long (duh). Maintaining high performance throughout freshman to junior year requires sustained commitment, motivation, and high quality.

If you do really well on a semester, great job—take time to celebrate, but steel yourself to do it again the next semester.

The good thing is that the earlier you start building good habits, the easier it gets. If you start all of this by freshman year, senior year will be a breeze and you'll be well prepared for college.

The Grand Summary: How to Get a 4.0 GPA in High School

Notice how most of this guide has been about mindset, your personal psychology, and healthy habits. This forms an effective framework you can apply to every class and semester of school. Every important concept that got me a 4.0 GPA is written here.

Now, the hard work is actually adopting these practices and continuing to apply them through your entire high school career.

What's Next?

Looking for more tips for doing well in high school and beyond? Check out my other in-depth guides on how to get a perfect SAT / ACT score and how to get into Harvard and the Ivy League .

Prepping for the SAT or ACT? We've written the highest quality prep guides available anywhere. Browse our separate guides for each major test section:

• SAT Reading | SAT Writing | SAT Math
• ACT English | ACT Math | ACT Reading | ACT Science

These recommendations are based solely on our knowledge and experience. If you purchase an item through one of our links, PrepScholar may receive a commission.

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How to Improve Your Grades

Last Updated: June 24, 2024 Approved

This article was co-authored by Jennifer Kaifesh and by wikiHow staff writer, Amy Bobinger . Jennifer Kaifesh is the Founder of Great Expectations College Prep, a tutoring and counseling service based in Southern California. Jennifer has over 15 years of experience managing and facilitating academic tutoring and standardized test prep as it relates to the college application process. She takes a personal approach to her tutoring, and focuses on working with students to find their specific mix of pursuits that they both enjoy and excel at. She is a graduate of Northwestern University. There are 12 references cited in this article, which can be found at the bottom of the page. wikiHow marks an article as reader-approved once it receives enough positive feedback. This article received 27 testimonials and 86% of readers who voted found it helpful, earning it our reader-approved status. This article has been viewed 710,659 times.

It's disappointing when your grades are lower than you want them to be, but don't get discouraged! It happens to almost everyone at some point. If it's early enough in the term, you may even be able to get a better grade in the classes you're struggling in now, but even if not, you can apply these tips to help you do better in your next course. Just keep trying—when you find the study habits that work best for you, you're almost certain to see it reflected in your grades!

Change up your study space.

• Pay attention to what distracts you while you're studying. Do you find yourself shifting in your chair a lot? It might help if you move to the couch. Does your sister always try to talk to you while you're doing your homework? You might ask your mom if you can lock your door while you study.
• You need to have a productive environment to study in. Your study environment should be free of distractions, so turn off your cell phone, clear your desk, and ask your friends or family member to respect your space.
• In general, it's best to keep your study area consistent from day-to-day, but it's okay to change things up while you're figuring out what works best for you.

Try new learning strategies.

• Educators used to think that people tend to have one learning style that works best for them—that you might be more of an auditory, visual, or kinetic learner, for instances. However, we now know that most students learn best by seeing information in a variety of different ways!

Rewrite your notes each night.

• Try to connect what you learned that day to things you've already learned. Making these connections will help you really understand the topic on a deeper level.
• If you have any questions, write them in your notes as well. Then, go back and try to find the answers in your textbook. If you can't find them, bring them to class the next day and ask your teacher.

Don't cram for tests.

• Try making your study time interactive by making flash cards, taking practice quizzes, or using mnemonic devices to help you memorize tricky lists.

Take breaks while you're studying.

• This is a great time to get a snack and do some stretching!

Take your time during exams.

• Don't let nerves get the best of you when it comes to exam time—you've been preparing for this!
• If any of the questions seem confusing, ask your teacher for help!

Practice writing organized essays.

• Essay questions can account for a huge part of your exam score in some classes, so it's worth taking the time to improve them!
• Try finding a few sample essay questions online or in your textbook and answer them on your own time to get comfortable with them before your test starts.

Always do your homework and turn it in on time.

• In some classes, you can actually end up with a failing grade for not turning in your homework, even if you get good grades on your exams.
• Make sure to do any assigned reading, as well. That can make it a lot easier to understand what your teacher is talking about in class.

Joseph Meyer

When doing practice problems, promptly check to see if your answers are correct. Use worksheets that provide answer keys for instant feedback. Discuss answers with a classmate or find explanations online. Immediate feedback will help you correct your mistakes, avoid bad habits, and advance your learning more quickly.

Keep your schoolwork organized.

• Staying organized extends to your work space as well. Keep your desk clear so you won't be surrounded by distracting clutter.

Pay attention in class.

• When you're taking notes, don't just write down everything the teacher says. Instead, you might jot down things like key concepts, vocab words and their definitions, and a few examples. And be sure to write neatly so you can re-read what you wrote! [10] X Research source
• Especially pay attention to anything your teacher mentions more than once—there's a good chance that's something important, and you might be tested on it later! [11] X Research source
• Try not to miss any classes, either—you probably won't get good grades if you skip class a lot. If you take online classes, log in at least once a day. In some classes, attendance is actually part of your grade!

Snack throughout the day.

• For instance, you might have a bowl of oatmeal for breakfast, an apple for a mid-morning snack, a sandwich and carrots for lunch, and cheese crackers in the afternoon.
• Most teachers won't let you eat in the classroom, but you may be able to keep snacks in your backpack or locker so you can fuel up between classes.

Get enough sleep at night.

• Sometimes it's hard to get enough sleep at night, especially if you have to work after school or your family makes a lot of noise. Sticking to a regular schedule will help you fall asleep quickly at bedtime, and the consistency will lead to better sleep overall.

Start a study group with your friends.

• Work together to come up with ways to remember key concepts, definitions, and other information that might be on your tests.
• You can even quiz each other to see how well you remember what you've learned!
• Just make sure you pick friends who have the same goals as you—a study group only works if you're willing to actually spend the time reviewing the course material.

Talk to your teacher about your grades.

• Try asking your teacher if they have any suggestions for how you might do better in their class—they might be able to recommend some study guides or extra homework that will help you understand the material better.
• Even if your teacher won't allow you to do any extra work to improve the grade you've already gotten, assure them that you're going to make an extra effort to do better for the rest of the term. Then, follow through with that promise!

Review basic concepts before diving into advanced topics. Identifying the gaps in your knowledge helps you avoid difficulties later on. Take an assessment or get your teacher's advice on where you can improve. Practice targeted exercises to build a strong foundation so you can confidently tackle new lessons.

Get a tutor if you're really struggling.

• Ask your teacher or counselor if they can recommend a tutor, or look online for tutors in your area.

Supercharge Your Studying with this Expert Series

Expert Q&A

Reader Videos

Tips from our Readers

• Take short 10 minute breaks every hour while studying. Get up, move around, stretch. This gives your brain time to process new information before diving back in. Marathon study sessions are counterproductive.
• Ask your teacher directly for advice if you are struggling. Be honest about what you think the issue is, and take responsibility. Most teachers are happy to provide guidance to students who care.
• Don't just read chapters once. Try summarizing key points aloud after reading, making flashcards, or explaining it to a friend. Engaging with the material in different ways improves retention.
• When taking exams, read through the entire test first to assess timing. Then do the questions you know best first before going back to trickier problems. Using time efficiently reduces stress.
• Set a consistent sleep schedule, even on weekends. Oversleeping can negatively impact attention span just as much as lost sleep. Keeping your body's clock regular optimizes mental sharpness.
• Switch up your study space if you're having trouble retaining material. Try a new room, the library, or anywhere free of distractions. Finding an optimal environment can really help.

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You Might Also Like

• ↑ https://www.livecareer.com/resources/careers/recent-grads/getting-better-grades
• ↑ Jennifer Kaifesh. Academic Tutor. Expert Interview. 8 November 2019.
• ↑ https://www.oxford-royale.co.uk/articles/improve-underperforming-grades.html
• ↑ https://kidshealth.org/en/teens/test-anxiety.html
• ↑ https://pennstatelearning.psu.edu/test-taking-tips
• ↑ https://www.oxford-royale.com/articles/improve-underperforming-grades/
• ↑ https://collegeinfogeek.com/how-to-take-notes-in-college/
• ↑ https://www.cdc.gov/healthyschools/health_and_academics/index.htm
• ↑ https://time.com/5689957/sleep-college-students-grades/
• ↑ https://kidshealth.org/en/teens/test-terror.html

About This Article

To improve your grades, start by studying continuously so that your brain has time to process the material you're learning, rather than cramming the day before a test. Wen studying, make study cards with a few facts or concepts on them so you can brush up on some of them each day. During class, stay focused on the information by asking questions and taking notes for future reference. Before a test, practice time management by studying in an area free from distractions and aiming to complete tasks within a set period of time. For tips on how to identify your learning style and when to ask teachers for extra help, keep reading! Did this summary help you? Yes No

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Student Opinion

Are Straight A’s Always a Good Thing?

By Jeremy Engle

• Dec. 11, 2018

Is academic excellence a priority for you? Do you believe your grades will have a big impact on your future?

In the Opinion essay “ What Straight-A Students Get Wrong ,” Adam Grant, an organizational psychologist, writes about the dangers of pursuing perfect grades:

A decade ago, at the end of my first semester teaching at Wharton, a student stopped by for office hours. He sat down and burst into tears. My mind started cycling through a list of events that could make a college junior cry: His girlfriend had dumped him; he had been accused of plagiarism. “I just got my first A-minus,” he said, his voice shaking. Year after year, I watch in dismay as students obsess over getting straight A’s. Some sacrifice their health; a few have even tried to sue their school after falling short. All have joined the cult of perfectionism out of a conviction that top marks are a ticket to elite graduate schools and lucrative job offers. I was one of them. I started college with the goal of graduating with a 4.0. It would be a reflection of my brainpower and willpower, revealing that I had the right stuff to succeed. But I was wrong. The evidence is clear: Academic excellence is not a strong predictor of career excellence . Across industries, research shows that the correlation between grades and job performance is modest in the first year after college and trivial within a handful of years. For example, at Google, once employees are two or three years out of college, their grades have no bearing on their performance. (Of course, it must be said that if you got D’s, you probably didn’t end up at Google.) Academic grades rarely assess qualities like creativity, leadership and teamwork skills, or social, emotional and political intelligence. Yes, straight-A students master cramming information and regurgitating it on exams. But career success is rarely about finding the right solution to a problem — it’s more about finding the right problem to solve.

The article continues:

Getting straight A’s requires conformity. Having an influential career demands originality. In a study of students who graduated at the top of their class, the education researcher Karen Arnold found that although they usually had successful careers, they rarely reached the upper echelons. “Valedictorians aren’t likely to be the future’s visionaries,” Dr. Arnold explained . “They typically settle into the system instead of shaking it up.” This might explain why Steve Jobs finished high school with a 2.65 G.P.A. , J.K. Rowling graduated from the University of Exeter with roughly a C average, and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. got only one A in his four years at Morehouse.

Students, read the entire article, then tell us:

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Home > Blog > Tips for Online Students > How to Get Good Grades in College: 16 Best Tips

Tips for Online Students , Tips for Students

How to Get Good Grades in College: 16 Best Tips

Updated: June 19, 2024

Published: April 11, 2020

Have you been wondering how to get good grades? Here is a list of 16 hints and tips to help you improve your high school or college grades. Truthfully, the ultimate secret to getting good grades is to develop super study skills .

Top Tips on How to Get Good Grades

1. attend all your classes.

Try your absolute best to attend all of your classes. Sometimes missing a class is unavoidable, but there are enormous benefits to making sure that you never miss a class:

• You will be more likely to keep ahead of your subject
• You will avoid knowledge gaps due to missing out on important material
• You will have the opportunity to make your presence known, by answering questions, participating, and contributing your ideas, thoughts, and opinions.
• Some colleges give attendance points, so if this is the case, make sure that you benefit from them.

2. Master Your Professors

• Get to know your professors and make sure that they get to know you. They will have a better opportunity to understand your strengths and weaknesses.
• Let them know when you are struggling. They are there to help you.
• Understand your course expectations. If there is anything that you are unsure of, don’t hesitate to ask your professor to clarify.

3. Stay Organized

If you want to know how to get even better grades, organization is really key.

• Use a planner or calendar and make sure that you are up to date with all of your deadlines
• Create a designated workspace with good lighting and a comfortable chair
• Declutter your desk
• Schedule blocks of time for learning
• Organize your digital files in named folders for ease of access
• Keep stationery on hand. Make sure that you have pens, highlighters, eraser, sharpener, notebooks, flashcards, and colored markers

Photo by  Bram Naus  on  Unsplash

4. time management.

Balancing work, study, and family responsibilities can be challenging if your time is not managed carefully . Time is a valuable commodity.

• Make a To Do list: Once everything that you need to do is written down, it not only helps you to remember it, but it gives you some relief from worrying about it.
• Use a planner/calendar: Record assignment deadlines and schedule your learning.
• Set goals: Decide on your daily, weekly, and monthly goals. Once you know where you need to get to, you will already be half way there. Setting goals gives you clarity and motivates you to take action.
• Utilize your “dead time”: Such as time in a doctor’s waiting room or time travelling on buses or trains. This time can be used for reading, researching, or typing up your thoughts, ideas, and notes.
• Clear your workspace: Our physical environment has a major effect on the way we work. A tidy space creates a tidy mind. Keep your workspace tidy and remove all clutter. A tidy workspace helps you to have a clearer mind. Marie Kondo, a decluttering expert and author of the book “Spark Joy” has some excellent hints and tips on how to keep your workspace tidy .

5. Taking Notes

Taking notes will help you at the revision and exam stage. The use of abbreviations is the best way to speed up your note taking . Your abbreviated notes should then be written out fully after class.

According to a research study on the correlation between writing and memory at Princeton University, there is a direct correlation between writing and memory. Writing involves a thinking process, resulting in greater retention of information, while typing on a keyboard can be done verbatim, without processing and reframing information, resulting in a lower rate of retention.

In order to get better grades, close your laptop and go back to old-fashioned pen and paper!

6. Become An Active Listener

• Concentrate on the words and messages. Avoid being distracted by a lecturer’s accent, clothes, speech, or mannerisms.
• Try to identify the most important points and take notes on them.
• Avoid getting distracted by your smartphone. Turn it off completely in class.

7. Participate In Class

• If you ask questions , you are more likely to remember the material, as the answers to your questions relate to your thoughts on the subject. If you make a habit out of asking questions, it has the additional advantage of encouraging you to listen well.
• Listen to the opinions and thoughts of your classmates. Listening will help you to process and remember information. Conversations tend to be remembered more than written information.
• Contribute to the discussion — by developing a regular habit of making contributions to discussions on the subject, it encourages you to listen, focus, and process. You will want to make a good impression by making educated and intelligent contributions.

8. Develop Good Writing Study Habits

During lectures, it’s generally a good idea to write down points, which can act as memory joggers. Then, after class, you can write out these notes in full.

Another popular method is to draw out mind maps during the lecture and expand on them later on. A mind map is a visual, usually colored diagram designed to be a hierarchy of information in which main points can be expanded on in note form later on.

How to Mind Map with Tony Buzan

Another tip on writing notes well is to draft, rewrite, and proofread your work. The more comprehensive your notes are, the easier it will be to review and study them at the exam stage.

9. Learn In Groups And Learn From Each Other

• Studying in small groups can break up the monotony of revision.
• You will have the opportunity to learn from each other.
• Make sure that when you are learning in a group, it doesn’t turn into a social event and you don’t get too distracted by unrelated conversations.

10. Know Your Learning Style

In order to become a better learner, you need to define and categorize the method by which you learn best. Once you have done this, you will have a much clearer idea of how to help yourself to process, absorb, and memorize information.

The VARK model of learning styles, developed by Neil Flemming — an educational theorist — identifies 4 distinctive categories of learners:

• V – Visual – Visual learners learn through seeing, therefore respond well to visual aids such as maps, charts, graphs, presentations, images, and videos.
• A – Auditory – Auditory learners learn through hearing and best absorb information that they hear such as lectures, discussions, and listening to audio books.
• R – Reading and Writing – Reading and writing learners learn through the input and output of words. This includes writing assignments, essays, reading books, manuals, and websites.
• K – Kinesthetic – Kinesthetic learners learn through touching, interacting, and doing. They learn best when they are physically engaged or active during the learning process. They remember and process knowledge best by interacting hands-on with their environment.

Assess yourself! Once you know how you learn best, you will be a far better learner.

11. Use Learning Aids And Study Resources

There are plenty of online tools and resources for flashcards, mind maps, quizzes, record keeping, scheduling, and memorizing that can be highly beneficial to learning.

To save you time, we have compiled a list of excellent study resource websites. Check out the following:

• Hippocampus
• StudyBlue (Chegg)
• Studystack .

12. Manage Interruptions And Distractions

• Find a quiet place to study. It can be a designated space at home or a library.
• Turn off your smartphone during your study sessions. Checking your phone every time you receive a notification is distracting and will take your mind off your learning and hinder your concentration.

13. Eat healthily and exercise

• Make sure to eat a balanced diet with plenty of fresh fruit and vegetables.
• Exercise regularly. It doesn’t need to be a full workout or an expensive gym membership. Go for walks, jog, run, or take a regular exercise class.
• Exercise improves concentration and memory .
• Drink plenty of water.

Photo by  Mae Mu  on  Unsplash

14. ask for help.

Many students see asking for help as a weakness. But asking for help is a strength! It shows that you have maturity, self-awareness, and that you are able to recognise a problem before it develops. If you are struggling with your schoolwork or have a personal problem, speak to your professors about it. They are there to help you with all your needs.

15. Take Regular Breaks

In order to get the most out of your study, you need to take breaks regularly.

Set an alarm every 30 to 60 minutes and get up, close your laptop and books, and get some fresh air for 5 to 10 minutes. Do any activity that will take your mind off studying so that when you come back to it, you are feeling refreshed and energized.

Everybody knows that lack of sleep is detrimental to your health. It produces lethargy, lack of concentration and “brain fog,” a form of mental clouding.

However, research has shown that a good night’s sleep is not only vital for health and general well-being, but extremely beneficial for learning and memory. During sleep, our brain is not resting as is commonly believed. Findings reveal that our brain mechanisms are at work during sleep, solidifying our memories by transferring them to more permanent regions of the brain.

The Bottom Line

If you follow these 16 tips on how to get good grades, you will surely see a marked improvement on your next test scores.

If you are still undecided on your choice of study and need to balance studying for a degree with work or family commitments, University of the People is a tuition-free, American accredited university that provides world-class bachelor’s and master’s degrees.

To learn more about us, see our informative and inspirational TED talk by Shai Reshef , founder of UoPeople.

In this article

At UoPeople, our blog writers are thinkers, researchers, and experts dedicated to curating articles relevant to our mission: making higher education accessible to everyone. Read More

Earning Good Grades Versus Learning

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Guest post by Amanda Gaughan, a Rider University preservice teacher

As a high school student, I was so worried about meeting deadlines and getting good grades that if I did not have something finished or was not prepared for an assessment, I would just stay home from school for the entire day. Looking back on my experience, I can clearly see that I put too much pressure on myself to complete everything and earn good grades.

Recently, my 14-year-old sister had to complete a French project . The project, which was worth more than 100 points, required her to create a video of her describing her family. As she wrote and practiced her lines, she became more and more visibly upset. I think her stress was stemming partially from the fact that she was describing our family, which some may consider to be “nontraditional.” However, I believe a significant amount of stress was caused by the heavy weight of the assignment; she was worried her grade would suffer drastically if she did not do well on this assignment.

My field placement this semester is in Thomas R. Grover Middle School in the West Windsor-Plainsboro school district in New Jersey. Like my own, this is a district in which there is significant pressure put on students by teachers, parents, and students to achieve. This is evident in the large number of students struggling to remain in honors algebra courses when they could be excelling in a regular-level algebra course. Furthermore, to alleviate some of the stress students feel from their parents, the district has opted to declare homework-free evenings, which sometimes fall on weekends. While this policy does help students on the nights it is enacted, it led me to wonder if more could be done to remove student stress from classroom environments.

The idea of a gradeless classroom seems exciting, as there is significant stress surrounding grades in many school districts on both ends of the spectrum. In the higher-achieving districts, students feel pressure from themselves and their parents to perform well, especially when the idea of college acceptances enters the equation. On the other hand, lower-achieving districts see their students stressed out about grades when assignments are missed, results of the other responsibilities students have such as caring for family members or working. Additionally, at home, these students do not receive the same academic support as students in higher-achieving districts. Students across the board should be focused on attaining knowledge of content and the learning process in general, rather than worrying about earning good grades.

Students should have the opportunity to delve into the topics which truly interest them. However, because of time constraints and curriculum requirements, reality has these opportunities far and few between. Unfortunately, many high schools are designed in a way that requires students to have a surface-level understanding of numerous topics, rarely allowing students to reach for deeper understanding. Some people say students will pursue their interests outside of school. While some may do so, students have a wide variety of interests, including sports, music, and art, which they often do not have the opportunity to do during school hours. The combination of the school-structure-induced limitations, extracurriculars, eating, and sleeping, leaves virtually no time in the day for students to explore academic interests. That being said, I decided to look further into the idea of gradeless classrooms as a way to not only alleviate student stress but also to engender a sense of lifelong learning in students.

Review of Research/Literature

The research process for gradeless classrooms proved to be limited. There has been very little research on the topic thus far. Rather than reading more formal academic journals and published work, I found myself searching blogs and Twitter to find information. I feel as though this reflects the reality of gradeless classrooms, as these classrooms are significantly less formal than traditional classrooms.

In Starr Sackstein’s Hacking Assessment 10 Ways to Go Gradeless in a Traditional School , Sackstein expresses the frustration she often felt with traditional letter grades’ inability to reflect her students’ growth. The book continues to detail how she transformed her classroom into the gradeless classroom she knows and loves today. In her experience, the lower-level learners were most comfortable with the new model in the beginning, as they were not labeled as incapable and were empowered to become experts in different areas of the course content (Sackstein, 2015, p. 15). However, for those students who were comfortable and successful in traditional classrooms, there was greater difficulty getting them on board. “Most of the 12th-grade Advanced Placement class defined themselves as A students, and if I took this away from them, how would they know they were excelling?” (Sackstein, 2015, p. 16). This exemplifies that some students are ready to dive into this new learning model, while others are more hesitant. To combat this, the classes had discussions about the definitions of achievement and the meaning of an A letter grade, stressing the importance of actually learning information versus working for a specific score or grade. Sackstein then describes the grading process. The school where she teaches requires her to update an online grade book with students’ progress on the course standards. Before grades are due, she has students compile finished work and complete a self-reflection Google Form. She then meets with them to discuss their progress on the standards. Together, they determine a grade for their report cards, leaving no surprises for when grades go out to parents.

In “ A New Kind of Classroom: No Grades, No Failing, No Hurry, ” Kyle Spencer details the changes a Brooklyn middle school made to improve student achievement. It details the origin of mastery-based learning in the 1960s with Benjamin Bloom, who “imagined a more holistic system that required students to demonstrate learning before moving ahead” (Spencer, 2017). To determine students’ readiness to move ahead, teachers used the New York state curriculum and the Common Core State Standards to develop a rubric with the skills students need to master in each grade level. Color coding is used to visually see student progress. Students have the duration of the school year to master their content as gradeless classrooms have less-strict time constraints than traditional classrooms. Implementing these policies was not automatic, but as time went on, students learned the importance of learning the material, and they began to do just that. Overall, the shift to the new classroom model improved student performance on standardized assessments and created a sense of ownership of learning for many students.

In a blog post entitled “I’m a Second Semester Senior,” an AP Environmental Science teacher describes the frustration he felt with his second-semester seniors working to earn grades instead of working to learn the material. He details his students’ grade-centered tendencies, which led him to take points off the table completely. These tendencies include students only completing the assignments they need to based on the desired grade, as well as students calculating the lowest grade they can get on an assessment to achieve their desired grade. He eventually makes the point that his students, by the time they are admitted to college and are thinking about prom and graduation, ask why they should care about grades. Rather than fighting them, he chose to join them by taking graded assignments away and supporting his students in learning the course content.

Andrew Burnett teaches 7th-grade math in a gradeless classroom. In his blog, he details the inner workings of his room and how he monitors student achievement. In his version of the gradeless classroom, he makes certain the students know the standards they are learning and practicing each day. Eight times per year, he has students self-assess and then conference with him about their progress to determine a grade. He also has students complete “Show Me What You Can Do” assignments, which serve as ungraded versions of traditional tests and show the standards reflected next to each question. To save student work while also having it available for students to learn from, Burnett uses Seesaw, an online portfolio. After students explain the correct procedure to solve the problem, he provides them the opportunity to redo similar questions on assessments if they feel they can perform better than they originally did. Additionally, Burnett changed his obligatory, graded homework to “learning opportunities.” This transforms grading time into time for him to plan more engaging lessons, and it gives students more ownership of their learning. They now get to decide if they need to do the additional practice or not. He says the number of students taking advantage of these learning opportunities is about the same as when they were required homework. Overall, Burnett feels the switch to a gradeless classroom has created a more relaxed atmosphere in the classroom and shifted focus away from grades and onto learning content, just as he had envisioned.

Research Questions:

How do gradeless classrooms promote lifelong learning for students?

Do certain types of learners benefit more from gradeless classrooms?

Methodology:

A combination of observing gradeless classrooms and interviewing students and teachers would be optimal to get a holistic view of the way these classrooms work, but this was not plausible for this small-scale project. Because gradeless classrooms are fairly new, there are not many environments with these policies. Therefore, the data for this study were collected through interviews with gradeless-classroom teachers about their experiences and the lasting impact they feel these environments have on students. I was able to find two of my interviewees through Twitter connections. There were three participants; S.S., who teaches English and newspaper courses in New York; A.S., who teaches science in Ontario; and A.B., who teaches mathematics in Massachusetts; who answered the following four questions:

Which specific content areas lend themselves to gradeless classrooms more naturally than others? Why or why not?

What types of learners benefit most from this new type of learning environment? In what ways?

How does a gradeless-classroom environment promote lifelong learning for students?

What policies/practices should educators implement in their gradeless classrooms to help develop their students as lifelong learners?

In examining the responses of the three interviewees, there were some similarities to each question.

In subjects which are more fluid, there are more opportunities for gradeless classrooms. This includes S.S.'s English classroom, as well as many other social studies and language arts classrooms. However, A.S. and A.B. teach science and math, respectively, and said it is possible to create gradeless-classroom environments with some careful preparation and planning.

The students who typically take longer to learn the material, students who truly care about learning content and not just passing assessments, and students who struggle to demonstrate their learning benefit most in gradeless classrooms. Additionally, A.B. pointed out that the students who lose points for not completing assignments once they understand a topic benefit in this new classroom model.

When schools remove the fear of getting poor grades, students are more willing to take risks in their classes. This can also lead to a greater desire to learn and a greater enjoyment of learning and the desire to learn. Taking away grades eliminates questions such as, “How many points is this worth?” and instead produces questions like, “How do I do this?” the type of questions educators should spend time answering.

Ultimately, when teachers focus on getting students to understand the material, more learning occurs in schools. In order for educators to develop lifelong learners, they should allot some class time for self-reflection. Additionally, time should be allotted for individual conferences with each student.

Discussion :

In combining the research and the collected data, two strong conclusions can be drawn. The first conclusion is that gradeless classrooms promote lifelong learning by shifting student focus from earning a grade to learning the course content. The second conclusion is that different types of learners can benefit from gradeless classrooms.

Gradeless classrooms promote lifelong learning in several ways. Beginning with Bloom’s original vision for mastery-based learning, students should master skills before advancing on to further topics. This reflects real life, as in most fields, the basics must be understood before higher-level work can be completed. In removing grades from classrooms, students become more willing to take risks. Rather than being focused on earning good grades, students can finally focus on learning the material. As A.B. shared, students’ questions change when grades are removed. In his experience, questions about the weight of an assignment were replaced with questions about math procedures themselves. The interviewees and literature also stressed the importance of incorporating opportunities for student self-reflection and student-teacher conferences. Self-reflection is critical, as it allows learners to assess their own understanding and progress. This reflection also helps learners see what information they still need to learn. Conferences give students the chance to showcase their work and progress over time, a skill required in a wide variety of fields. Some critics of the gradeless classroom believe students will not apply themselves and complete work. However, Burnett shared when he changed mandatory homework into available “learning opportunities,” he had nearly the same percentage of students completing them. Overall, gradeless classrooms create independent, lifelong learners by allowing students to take on some of the responsibility of their own educations.

The second conclusion is that different types of learners benefit from gradeless classrooms. Some people believe the gradeless -classroom model leaves students with too many decisions about which assignments to complete. However, as Sackstein described, she saw that students of all levels took some time to adjust, but they were eventually able to succeed in this new type of classroom. Some students catch on to new content easily and do not benefit from completing practice after practice as traditional classrooms require. Contrastingly, some students require more time to learn concepts, and they get that with the gradeless-classroom model. Students have multiple opportunities throughout the school year to demonstrate their understanding of content, not just one summative assessment as is common in many classrooms. Additionally, students who are normally written off in traditional classrooms benefit from gradeless classrooms. This model returns to them a sense of confidence and gives them the time they need to really excel. When there are grades to worry about, students’ brainpower is taken away from learning the content and is used to determine what they need to do for a certain grade. When this distraction is removed, students who truly want to learn the material have time to do exactly that. In general, when grades are removed from classrooms, all students can benefit.

Implications for Practice:

For the gradeless classroom: Any subject-area teacher can implement a gradeless classroom, so long as educators are strategic in choosing the classroom policies that will govern their rooms. Periodically, time should be allotted for students to reflect on their work and learning. Additionally, student-teacher conferences should be implemented to allow the student to discuss how they feel their learning is progressing. This will also allow time for teachers to share their observations and describe any changes they feel necessary to ensure student success in learning.

For the graded classroom: These practices are not exclusive to the gradeless classroom. The creation of a rubric of all the standards students need to learn is a good framework for ensuring assessments are accurate. Additionally, students need to be able to assess their understanding of topics as college students and as working individuals, so providing opportunities like questionnaires and conferences for students to self-reflect will benefit them tremendously. Educators should also reflect on their grading policies and their effect on student stress levels.

For myself as a future educator: Sackstein’s idea of discussing the meaning of achievement seems as though it is a good starting place to create a classroom culture focused on learning. Additionally, I know schools expect teachers to grade students based on their abilities to do each skill as described in the curriculum. To help me do this, I plan to keep a record of all the course standards and mark when each student achieves each standard. I think a color-coding system, like the one used in Brooklyn, would help myself and students monitor progress. Conferencing with students about their work in class would help us come to a mutual understanding of what comes next in their learning journey as well as a letter grade if required, which represents their learning up to that point. I believe viewing learning as a continuous journey, rather than a series of topics or chapters, will help students understand learning is not confined to the walls of their school or their youth.

Burnett, A. (2018, March 8). How to create a gradeless math classroom in a school that requires grades [Blog post]. Retrieved from https://burnettmath.wordpress.com/2018/03/08/how-to-create-a-gradeless-math-classroom-in-a-school-that-requires-grades/

I’m a second-semester senior [Blog post]. (2017, December 19). Retrieved from What’s the point? website: https://mrhallihan.blogspot.com/2017/12/im-second-semester-senior.html

Sackstein, S. (2015). Hack Learning: Hacking assessment. Cleveland Times 10.

Spencer, K. (2017, August 11). A new kind of classroom: No grades, no failing, no hurry. The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/11/nyregion/mastery-based-learning-no-grades.html

Amanda Gaughan is a junior at Rider University double-majoring in secondary education and mathematics. She is a STEM Scholars recipient and expects to graduate in May 2020. While working as a tutor in a New Orleans charter school, she discovered her love for teaching. Amanda has been coaching competitive cheerleading for the past five years and has been a camp counselor for the past two summers. Working with children in these nonacademic capacities inspires her to create a stress-free classroom environment for her future students. Twitter: @msgaughanclass

The opinions expressed in Work in Progress are strictly those of the author(s) and do not reflect the opinions or endorsement of Editorial Projects in Education, or any of its publications.

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Why Getting Good grades In academics is Really Important?

Grades do matters and good grades will lead us to first-class universities, first-class colleges, and job applications which concludes our future success.

Pratibha Singh

Witnip technology

More posts by Pratibha Singh.

When did you last had a talk with your parents regarding grades?

It’s a quite common topic for a conversation to happen in every household regarding grades.

And yes, it’s good to talk with your teen but discussing the disadvantages and scary tactics of not getting decent grades such as, “you’ll never get into a good college unlike your friends”, “you’ll never get a decent job to survive” is quite tempting and leaves a negative impression on teens.

What will happen if we get superior grades? Are these grades ever going to help us?

The answer is obviously a big ‘yes’.

I’ve heard many people saying grades don’t matter and also “a single sheet of paper cannot decide your future”. Make sure you score maximum grades before saying this.

Still not convinced about the great role that grades play in determining your success?

After reading the 5 reasons given below, You will realize that you have been living in the myth for these years, giving a blindfold to your academic performance. Don’t miss the last one.

“Looking for Programming Help ”? Contact AssignmentXp.com and they have experts available 24*7 to provide any kind of assistance regarding the programming.

Here are the 5 reasons why grades are important

Better Opportunities Are Always Ready to Knock on Your Door.

Let ’ s go back to our school days!!!!

Talking about school life, I don’t know about others but mine was in such a way where students who study better, who score better grades are always provided with different scholarships, rewards in terms of compliments, they get a chance to go on educational trips so that they always stay motivated and do better in the academics.

Teachers too directly or indirectly tend to focus more on studious kids and personally tell them about other opportunities. Teachers are more friendly with such people and often treats them more adequately.

In our education system, success is often measured by grades. Grades are important at every step from getting admission to good colleges or universities, to getting a decent job for succeeding.

Better Colleges Are Ready to Welcome You

Ever thought of getting admission to one of the world’s best universities?

Better grades grant admissions in a reputed academic college, and academic success at the finest universities leads to a high-paying job that will fulfill your as well as your family’s needs including high bank balance, social status, a big house, exotic vacations, and many more.

Especially, if you wish to pursue higher professional courses such as law firm, engineering, veterinary studies, MBA, CA, CFA, etc even greater significance is placed on grades. Your GPA score is of utmost importance for your admission to renowned colleges.

Good colleges not only guarantee academic excellence but also plays a great role in a child’s holistic development. They believe in practicality and prepare students not only for the board exams but also for the exams that the students are going to face in the future.

Better Grades Cause No Stress

If you get better grades in your examination will there be any other kind of stress??

Well, according to my it’s a big ‘No’. on the other hand, it feels so good seeing my parents proud of me. It feels so wonderful when your friend’s parents compare you with their child in the parent-teacher meeting. Let me share with you my experience, when I was unable to get better grades compared to my classmates, I was so embarrassed and stressed out that I started overthinking. And…..

“Stress comes from ignoring stuff that shouldn’t be ignored.”

I gave more importance to other things rather than my studies and simply for that reason I was surrounded by the dark clouds of stress and anxiety. seeing others getting complimented by teachers in front of the whole class and me sitting with others clapping for my friend’s achievement made me sad.

As soon as I realized I started studying harder and gradually my grades improved and seeing those grades my stress was relieved and I felt relaxed.

Better Grades Attract Employers

College is the closest thing to the professional or the business world that we young people experience and how well we perform there indicates our performance in our job life.

According to employment recruiters, a student with a better GPA score shows that the given candidate can focus on tasks, handle pressure, learn quickly, and is motivated to succeed. And these are the qualities that the job recruiters are searching for and it is a safe bet to elect candidates with these qualities.

Good Grades Boost Your Confidence

Teens sometimes are afraid to try hard because they’re afraid of failure and hence they give up and never try. What’s there to be afraid of? Always remember one thing,

“You try, you fail, congratulations many people don’t even try”

Just give your best and you will see the results. And that will surely motivate you to perform better the next time to keep up your good work. It will bring confidence in you and you’ll be able to take up more challenges in your academics.

Good Grades Provide You With a Scholarship

Getting a scholarship is of great honor, isn ’ t it? have you ever been selected for the scholarship exam?

we always felt jealous seeing our classmate getting selected for scholarship exams, receiving a scholarship doesn’t matter just being selected for scholarship exams makes us feel proud.

Students these days should get guidance about the advantages and opportunities of getting scholarships so that they perceive it hard to achieve the same.

Better grades, higher test scores, excellent behavior, involvement in other curricular activities, clubs, honor societies, attracts special funding, and scholarships from various organizations.

scholarships can be of great help for financially backward students wishing to pursue higher studies and can also be a great help to pay off student loans. Wait, wait……

Don ’ t feel tensed if you score average.

scholarships can be of great help for financially backward students wishing to pursue higher studies and can also be a great help to pay off student loans.

I understand, many pupils after reading the advantages of better grades will become quite nervous if you are an average scorer. Every finger of your hand can’t be equal and hence no one can be perfect in everything.

Don’t compare yourself with your friends but with the old you. And, doing everything is of no use, but excelling in one of them is quite important.

Every person in this universe is either gonna become an employer or an employee. That is you are either gonna work for someone or make someone work, isn’t it?

If you are dreaming to work in one of the MNC’s ( Microsoft, Nokia Corporation, Reebok International Limited, etc) out there, your GPA (grade point average)score in your resume will be your biggest factor for getting selected as employers there are looking for students who can quietly follow their directions and deliver exactly what is expected from them.

On the other hand, the criteria for enlisting candidates in Indian Companies include a child’s non-cognitive skills such as problem-solving skills, leadership qualities, oral communication. Of course, grades matter but it’s not the only factor that will decide your selection.

now comparing both the cases, If you had always had a dream to work in one of those MNC’s out there, don’t let your grades take you downwards and study so hard that people think you are crazy

But if you are blessed with some of the non-cognitive skills, Indian companies would be a better option to go with. If you are an average scorer but have great debating skills, communication skills, keep participating in all sorts of competitions held on your campus. Take up various public speaking sessions and work on your soft skills. The majority of the students reading this blog don’t have an idea of what they are going to do in the future and hence this question often annoys us.

“ What are your future goals?” they will always end up saying that they ’ ve not yet decided .

But however one day you will get married, have a wife, a child, or children. You wish to live a decent life, give your family all the luxuries that you never received in your childhood. At that time you will wish that you would’ve made enough money and had a better job.

Ok, let’s leave that and think about the present. Don’t you have your dreams of owning a Mercedes, residing in a bungalow with a swimming pool, wearing custom-made suits and expensive watches? just thinking about them makes you smile brightly but the very next second your smile disappears thinking you can’t probably achieve it.

You can, but for that, you need to make preparations from now, you have to study well and give your everything in academics and make sure that I have to achieve all those dreams that I dreamt of as a child. Studying is only for a limited period, but what you’re going to enjoy will be lifetime enjoyment. So why not sacrifice a bit more for your comfortable future?

This article is especially for generation Z who are enjoying giving exams online. it has almost been a year and teachings are done through online means. I clearly understand that our teaching was transferred from offline to online in no time. Not only teaching but exams too. Students don’t understand online teachings even though teachers are trying their level best.

The question is why??

Why are we not able to understand anything? It is pretty simple that we are just scrolling Instagram during our lectures or simply just ignoring our classes. Isn’t it guys?

That’s something that most of the students do. And now when the exams are conducted we simply google the answers. I can surely say that 95% of the students do this and get better grades.

But are these grades going to help you? Will these grades satisfy you?

No, right? When everything’s back to normal and schools reopen, exams will be conducted offline and you will then realize that you lost your concentration in your studies because you didn’t study at all

Don’t mind what I said but that’s the fact!! You can change even now there’s still time left. Avoid things that distract you from your studies. Start gaining your concentration again.

If you like my content and want to support me, please share this article on your social media or Buy me a coffee !

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Home — Essay Samples — Life — Intrinsic Motivation — Should Students Get Paid for Good Grades

Should Students Get Paid for Good Grades

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Published: Mar 20, 2024

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Financial incentives and motivation, undermining intrinsic motivation, equity and fairness.

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Easiest way getting good grades: organizing ourselves and our time, being active in the class

Easiest way getting good grades.

ditoaji 5 / 7   Sep 14, 2017   #2 Hi Nuraya, As far as i know that academic writing requires us to make a short conclusion and not to come up with a new idea in conclusion body. It seems that your paraphrasing and summarizing skills are needed. In the first sentences of your first, second and third body paragraphs you have presented main idea but not the topic sentence and your thesis statement. I think it should be as follow : First and foremost, we have to organize all of our studying activities. (First and foremost, Having well-organized of all studying activities may helps students getting a better score. ( Despite writing the subject "we" in academic style, it is good to put the writer views out of the essay) Also as introductory you may write short main ideas, so does in conclusion statement without any additional main idea, just summarize and paraphrase from the previous body paragraph.

Holt  Educational Consultant - / 15185   Sep 14, 2017   #3 Nuraya, I need to know if you are writing these essays as part of your preparation for taking a qualifying English exam or if you are practicing academic writing for a classroom setting. The purpose of your writing will dictate the instructions for the development of your essay. You see, the English test essays have a different set up from the academic one. For example, in a qualifying test, you cannot introduce new information in the conclusion. However, in an academic essay, you may introduce additional information in the conclusion based upon a given set of parameters. Each writing style is unique and centered on a specific purpose. Unless you clarify the actual purpose for the essay, I won't be able to give you truly useful and consistent advice regarding your writing skills. There are a few things that I can tell you that you did wrong in this essay though. The first is that you introduced a question in the thesis statement. In an essay, whether it be for academic or test purposes, it is best that you do not pose a question in the introduction because that will force a lengthy discussion of the essay instead of a simple, straightforward discussion. Your question must be posed in the form of a complete sentence at the end of the opening paragraph instead. A research paper, makes a statement out of question because your information will justify your point of view or discussion criteria. Your tone of writing is also inconsistent. You need to make sure that you use solely academic words and statements throughout the essay. Do not use slang or everyday terms such as "stuff". Use academic equivalents because you are not writing a grade school essay anymore. You are writing a college / masters level paper which means, your vocabulary should be more complex and your method of thinking, more serious, thus requiring a more serious tone in your writing. As for the conclusion, you are struggling with it because you did not really outline your essay. When you write any sort of essay, it is important to list down you discussion points before you draft your essay. That way, you know exactly when you should conclude the discussion and how you plan to conclude it. Basically, if you have already responded accurately to your thesis statement, you can conclude the essay by making one last, strong pitch of additional information that ties in with the thesis statement that you made, then close by reminding the reader that you have fully responded to the thesis statement you introduced in the first paragraph. However, if you are writing for a qualifying exam, you cannot add new information and should instead, just summarize the information you previously provided along with a new paraphrase of your thesis statement.

OP Nuraya 2 / 4   Sep 14, 2017   #4 thank you for all of your suggestions. i have corrected both introductory and conclusion of mine. this essay is not for qualifying english but just for an assignment that my lecturer gave to me. i still learn how to change my tone sounds more serious but it's quite hard for me.