Grades

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What do you guys do to get your grades up in college?

Made studying an obsessive interest. (though it had to compete with some non-productive ones)
Never left the house except to go shopping (and to walk the dogs)
Withdrawing completely to eliminate distractions while in class.


Double major in 3 years. GPA >3.5.

Not recommended.

Im kinda disappointed with myself in that I only have a 3.0 or so which will make it very hard to get into law/grad school.

How do people here make studying an obsession. I've got this horrid videogame obsession that killed my previous semester's grades.

I never understood the obsession with GPA in the first place. There is no connection between you GPA in college and how you will perform in the real world.

It is the same as the supposed connection between you SAT score and how successful you will be in college.

Is there no correlation between the 2? I mean, even though I don't think that GPA is a perfect predictor I would think that there would be a correlation based upon the facts that people with higher GPAs are more likely to be more dedicated or more intelligent than the rest of the population.

Not true.

The only thing a high GPA tells me is that the person was able to jump through all of the hoops the teacher set up.

Also, GPA takes into consideration grades from all your subjects. I don't know about other courses, but my course at university seems to always have at least one subject per semester that is widely considered to be 'filler' (meaning it's largely irrelevant and an enormous waste of money). Doing well in subjects like that as opposed to doing well in another, relevant subject will net you a similar GPA, so GPA won't show a person their academic profile. It's only an average.

Do you mean that according to research there is no correlation? I mean, certainly jumping through some idiot teacher's hoops is a part of it, however, still, people with higher GPAs would be more likely to have high intelligence and good work ethics as they would be smart enough to figure out how to jump through those hoops and work hard enough to do so as well. Do you know of any better predictor of future success than the GPA?

Well I know a lot of people who spend a lot of time doing assignments for their course that aren't really that relevant, and end up spending less time on actually reading up on things that matter. I'm the opposite of that, sort of. I leave assessments till I have to do them (unless they really are relevant, which they only are 50% of the time), and spend more time reading up on the important stuff. Because of that I might get a lower GPA but I don't really care, as long as I don't feel that I just missed a whole lot of content upon finishing a course.

Yeah, my GPA is lower than it could be because I don't like jumping through hoops and stuff like that.

I'm planning to study an obsession (well, two actually... one is my major and another is my minor), so that'll help me get stuff done quickly and possibly focus a little more.

Still, the larger a difference in GPA, the more people notice...for good or bad.

Which is exactly what the "real world" is like. If you learn to jump through the hoops well, you'll be able to deal with the hoops your boss sets up. If not, you're out of luck. Best to learn it as well as you can while you're young.

So far, I've mostly just taken classes that were fun (C programming, pysch, discrete math, physical anthropology, etc.) I switched one math class to credit/no credit because the teacher was psychotic, but other than that, I just focused on trying to pay attention to anything the teacher repeated during lectures. Anything mentioned more than once, got a star on my notes and got studied extra hard. I also asked for lots of clarifying details, especially on questions on assignments, so I could find out what kind of answers my teacher wanted (I had a couple who were pretty vague at first in their questions.)

I watched in quizzes and midterms for what kinds of questions the teacher asked - so, for example, my psych teacher had a thing about "mental illness" and "addictions" so I studied extra on those for the tests. Online classes are really kewl too - because they tend toward more "concrete" information, rather than vague stuff.

I also worked with the Disabilities Center to make sure I had accomodations like being able to take my tests with a computer for any essays, and having some extra time.

I made sure that any class I took, I tried to find the interesting parts to tie into, so that it wouldn't be just boring. Stuff that was way too boring, I studied for 15 minutes at a time, with a timer, to be able to keep my mind focused. I put all my tests and study schedule into my PDA to remind me of when/what I needed to do.

My GPA for this year was 4.0, so far, and I just got accepted to Stanford as a transfer student. I'm going to major in Symbolic Systems.

Well, I wasn't in a one of those programs where standardization was critical, so grades wheren't that important.

I probably didn't put in enough effort, but at the same time, I did pretty well in some classes.


Then again, I was taking the program because I wanted to learn things, getting a career out of it is secondary. (The fact the information technology world is a pretty bleak place doesn't help)


Being that it was a trades program, for the most part the best way to get good grades is to do a lot of practice at whatever it is the class was about (generally programming).


The classes I did poorly in where the ones with bad teachers and a lot of fluff (I actually had one great teacher in a fluff class. Didn't do too well in that one )


But then again, the Students and Instructors in that program for the most part had some pretty similar personalties. I think that made it a lot easier for communication of information.

And, you know, for the most part good teachers. That goes pretty far.