How to Get Great Grades in Hard Classes

Published in

Student Voices

6 min readJun 21, 2018

College classes are hard. But one of the most important things I learned during my freshman year at Johns Hopkins was that getting good grades in tough classes is not a matter of spending a lot of time studying, but of studying the right way. In this article, I’ll show you the strategies I learned from diligent experimentation and learning from some of the top students in the school that will help you earn the grades you need in even the most brutal courses.

Of course, scoring the best grades aren’t the only goal of taking classes in school. Implementing these strategies will help you to master the material in your courses and enjoy them perhaps even more than you thought you could. In the process, you’ll expand your thinking and problem solving abilities, and you’ll acquire more knowledge to be able to contribute to solving problems in the world. Learning how to study takes time, and while I still have a lot to learn, I improved tremendously as I began to implement the strategies that follow. I know you can do the same. :)

Math and Science Courses

How to Stay Ahead

If you want to stay on top of your work, you need to stay ahead. If you don’t do homework until the night before it’s due, you won’t be up to speed on the content as it’s being taught in lecture.

I recommend scheduling your sections/recitations as early in the week as possible.

If a professor expects you to read the textbook to understand what’s going on in lecture, read/skim the necessary chapters before class. Don’t get too caught up in details, but don’t just read the section headings either. You just need to be familiar with the concepts so that when the professor goes over the ones he or she views as important (and most likely to show up on an exam) in lecture, you understand them. This helps with the next point.

Learn Everything Once

You don’t want to wait until a week before an exam to relearn everything that was covered in lectures over the course of the semester — you want to learn it once. The easiest way I’ve found to do this is to read the textbook before class for general understanding so you understand the most important points when the professor covers them in lecture.

If the professor is bad at lecturing, consider whether it is worth your time to go.

One option is to skip lecture, and learn the material from better teachers online (perhaps Khan Academy or MIT Online CourseWare) or from the textbook. The downside of this is that you miss out on the points the professor highlights in lecture. If their notes are posted online, this might not be an issue. One of my friends performed exceptionally well in a math class she didn’t attend, because they focused on reading the professor’s online lecture notes at their own pace and watching MIT OCW videos for tricky concepts. If they got stuck, they just went to office hours and got help.

Another option is to go to lecture, but if the professor starts rambling, just pull up the notes online or focus on copying notes from their slides rather than being confused by what they are saying. This way you can spend time thinking about something until it makes sense to you rather than hurriedly going along with the pace of the lecture.

Bringing the textbook to class and reading about the concepts from this other perspective simultaneously as the professor covers them can also be helpful.

Homework

Try to do homework as efficiently as possible. While there is value in working and thinking through problems that are tough, don’t be afraid to go to office hours for help. If permitted by your professor, check your homework with a friend after you each finish doing it individually — this way you can figure out how to work through the problem yourself, but are at less risk of losing points for a trivial mistake.

Studying

Scoring high on math and science exams is all about practice — not only to cement your understanding of the concepts, but to lower the probability you make a simple mistake on an exam. Reviewing your notes or a professor’s online notes can be useful, but I’ve found doing practice problems to be significantly more helpful when preparing for an exam.

Practice on materials as close to the exam questions as possible. You want to do problems that mimic the style of those the professor writes. If he or she provides a practice exam, focus most of your attention on it. Homework and lecture problems the professor writes are also very helpful. Redoing homework problems from the textbook can be useful as well if you don’t have an ample supply of problems written by the professor.

Quantity is key. For my first organic chemistry exam, my professor gave us the previous four years’ exams for practice. One of my best friends did each of them four times, which I thought was crazy — how useful could redoing problems that many times be? It turns out it’s very useful — they finished the semester with an A+. Redo practice exams, past exams, homeworks, and online problems from other universities’ course websites (but don’t use past exams/”backtests” if not permitted by the professor).

Also, make sure you’re familiar with your professor’s preferred methods for solving problems (i.e. if a problem could be solved a few different ways). I’ve found that exam problems are often designed to be solved using a professor’s preferred techniques and are thus much more quickly and easily completed by using them. If the professor is hosting a review session before the exam, definitely go.

Don’t be afraid to ask the professor for ideas about where you should focus your studying, or how you should go about studying for their exam. This can provide extremely valuable insight and save you time.

Teach — If you begin studying relatively early, your friends can ask you questions about the material. Explaining it to them will help you remember and will help you realize where there are gaps in your knowledge.

Don’t slack , but know when to stop. Don’t spend time on things that aren’t useful, like a review session put on by underqualified individuals or too much textbook reading.

Writing Courses

The following advice will help you excel in writing-intensive / essay-based courses.

Try to make an outline of your essay as early as possible, and get feedback on it from your professor. This will ensure that your essay is on the right track. From there, you can just expand on your outlined points when you actually sit down to write the essay.

Get Feedback. Go to your professor and your university’s writing center for feedback on your piece. If they think something you wrote is confusing, you can either fix it or delete it altogether. Focus your energy on expanding on the points in your essay that these mentors like best.

Keep in mind that on essays that are subjectively graded, there is usually a list of objective criteria that your professor is looking for in your work. You could write a stellar essay, but if it is missing these elements, your score probably won’t be as high as it could be. Make sure you know what the professor is looking for when grading — if you have everything, you’ll probably be happy with your grade. :)

Bonus Advice

Generally avoid taking classes you’re not interested or that you don’t think are useful. I think a lot of the time when students are unhappy at universities, it is because they spend too much time on things they have no interest in doing.

Optimize your schedule for classes with excellent professors. This can make an enormous difference in not only the quality of your education, but how much you enjoy it.