<p>You’re getting lots of good advice. Speaking as a professor and a mom, I do recommend visiting the professor for office hours. Before doing that, your daughter should go over every question she missed and see if she understands on her own what she did wrong. This is called “doing your homework” before office hours. She will want to be able to recall and articulate for her professor her thinking so that the professor can help her determine where that thinking went wrong. Your daughter also may want to consider joining a study group. That class already may have study groups and your daughter just hasn’t noticed. These are usually self-forming among the students. Study groups enable students to process their learning and see if, in talking with their classmates, they really do have understanding. Second, your daughter should see if a Learning Center or Academic Advising Center (these places go by different names at colleges) offers study skills sessions for students. Many universities do. These meet once or twice a week for an hour. The staff who lead these sessions help students acclimate to college-level expectations. Many bright students don’t really have to work very hard in high school and they are thrown for a loop by college because they haven’t developed solid study habits. These sessions draw on research in learning theory to guide students in developing their study skills. If your daughter’s school doesn’t offer something like this she and/or you could try a book such as “6 Days To Better Grades: Powerful Study Advice For All College Students.” If you type this into Amazon, you will see that under the “people who liked this book also looked at…” there are 6-10 books in this general genre - short, sassy guides to jumpstarting college-level skills. Finally, the call home in tears about the awful first test is standard-issue, freshman, first semester experience. My daughter did the same thing her freshman year. The key is to think through this, as you are doing, with your daughter and help her use this as the learning experience that it is.</p>