Steps to get straight-As
Here’s a few steps to get some perfect straight-As!
Preview your classes: this might sound silly to some of you, but honestly it helps a lot. Try to force yourself to read through your textbook or notes that you know your teacher will be teaching the day before class, so that you can have a slight idea of what’s going to happen tomorrow. Try highlighting the texts, or, if you’re feeling in the mood, do some outlining! Trust me, you will be so much more confident in class and that will also help you to only jot down things that’s not in your textbook. Lazy people are in fact the ones who do the prep work because they want to save time in the future!
Take class notes: Having previewed your class, you’ll realise class is in fact quite fun (shocker here). When your classmates are trying so hard to copy everything down from the powerpoints, you only have to write down things that aren’t included in your notes/textbooks. And, since you should have figured out the things you didn’t understand the night before, you can pay more attention on those parts during class, or even ask your teachers about it!
Outline Notes: When you’re home after school (preferably) or during the weekend, try to combine your class notes and textbooks together and make your perfect outline notes. Do your outline notes after every class instead of waiting till your teacher finishes a chapter/section. It will help you to keep track of your classes!
Study guides: After a chapter/section, it’s good to narrow it down to a nice and simple study guide. Try to omit information that’s already in your brain from your outline notes and reorganize it into a study guide. The whole process will help you to review the knowledge once again and at the same time give yourself some good source for studying for finals.
Index cards: this should be the last step. I usualy prepare index cards when I’m studying for a test. Before the test, I will use my study guide to study, and write down key information (either some main points or parts that I can hardly remember) onto the index cards. The night before/ the morning before the test, the only thing I’m holding is my index cards. So while all your pals are holding their large pile of notes and cramming in the hallways, you can confidently walk with only some cards!
In that case, you’ve basically gone through the same knowledge five times (wow). Honestly though, it doesn’t take much time each and trust me, you’re going to benefit from it SO MUCH MORE! It’s only a matter of habit! Good luck!
