<p>After five semesters, I have a 3.98 at a fairly good state school. To be honest, I don’t have a set ‘technique’ but I’ll try to explain a little bit of what’s worked for me. </p>
<p>I study/work around 2-3 hours per day, seven days a week. I’m very selective about the work I do. I never do all the reading; instead I focus on the overarching concepts behind the material. I probably spend half my time just ‘thinking’ about what is happening. Instead of forcing myself to memorize hard facts, I think of the class in question as a narrative, and the material as ‘patches’ in that narrative. About five days before any test, I plan out a schedule for reviewing the material and do a little bit each night, and then review everything I think I might need to know the night before.</p>
<p>I work hard, but I don’t think that I ever really sacrificed that much. I almost always go out on Fridays and Saturdays, I have plenty of friends, and I’m on a club sports team. I just 1) know how to study efficiently and 2) can write strong papers.</p>
<p>Well this says something. If you’re only working 2-3 hours daily and still have a 3.98 GPA, one or more of the following must be true: (1) you are going to a very easy school (that’s not to say it isn’t “fairly good”; there might just be extremely high grade inflation), (2) as you said, you are an extremely efficient studier/worker, borderline genius (if not).</p>
<p>2-3 hours a day is less than most highschoolers work.</p>
<p>The vast majority of people I know at my school works at least that amount minimum each day on average. And to obtain an A in most classes here, you will need to work more than that. My guess is anyone who only works that amount and gets away with a 3.9 GPA is certainly going to a ****-easy school.</p>
<p>And I just found out from a source that GPA inflation is not prevalent at my school, which is probably a reason it’s more difficult to get As here than in some other top schools.</p>
<p>My 3.83 was earned working and studying about an hour a week at Duke in biology, chemistry, and economics courses.</p>
<hr>
<p>And contrary to most discussions, the math establishes that grade inflation (when corrected for LSAT scores) is prevalent not at Ivies but at state schools. Compared to most Ivies, Duke is a little inflated.</p>
<p>Science courses don’t assign homework. Lab sciences had lab reports, usually about a half an hour a week, but I didn’t always have one of those. Economics courses had problem sets, which usually took about a half an hour a week. Other courses had about four papers due a semester.</p>
<p>Normal courseloads at Duke are four courses (10 hours in classroom). I averaged about 4.5, with a minimum of four and a maximum of six. The heaviest semester I have ever spent, hours-wise (42 hours in classroom) was also the easiest in terms of work (eight hours over the semester for the 4.0).</p>
<p>That doesn’t sound like too much homework. If it is a lot of work (“a lot” as perceived by the average member on these forums), I guess you’re just fast.</p>
<p>I never heard about state schools having the largest amount of grade inflation. Where did you learn this?</p>
<p>Edit: I want to clarify/correct some of the things I posted earlier. (1) Now that I think about it, I actually probably spend less than 2-3 hours on average a day doing work. However, around exams, it usually pulls up to at least that amount. (2) When I said that most highschoolers do at least 2-3 hours of work, that’s assuming you have a full AP, IB or honors courseload. (3) Regarding my grade situation before which was addressed to member futurenyustudent, I was referring to my cumulative grade situation, which is a good mixture of As and Bs at the moment. However, most of the As are recent scores and most of the Bs are scores from the first year, possibly due to the fact that I am working harder than last year. It seems, then, that a 3.9 here is feasible, especially if one remains consistent beginning freshman year (and it seems most people do not), although in any case it is possibly more difficult to obtain As here and at other non-grade-inflationary top colleges than at schools with relatively higher grade inflation, or at easier schools, etc.</p>
<p>“The vast majority of people I know at my school works at least that amount minimum each day on average. And to obtain an A in most classes here, you will need to work more than that. My guess is anyone who only works that amount and gets away with a 3.9 GPA is certainly going to a ****-easy school.”</p>
<p>I have a 3.9+ GPA and certainly do not spend more than 3-4 hours a day doing work. Indeed, often times, I find myself getting by with just doing maybe 1-2 hours of work on a given day. To be fair, I’m a Poli Sci major and take mostly humanities classes, so I don’t have a ton of homework per se; it’s mostly reading. But even then, one learns early on in college life that doing all of one’s assigned reading is unnecessary, impractical, and inefficient. Then again, I don’t have to tell you folks that. </p>
<p>And for the record, I think very few people would describe my school as “easy”.</p>
<p>I remember one political science professor once explained to us that he assigned 300 pages of reading a night and highlighted 20 pages of them as being very important. He did this because he learned from experience that if he just assigned the 20 pages, kids would read one or two of them and then stop. But if you assign 300 pages and mark 20 of them “important,” kids will actually read the 20.</p>
<p>He had to do this because kids learned, early on, that the assigned reading usually doesn’t matter an awful lot. So this was his way of adjusting. My assumption (I never took his class) was that really they could have gotten away with just 3 or 4 pages. By officially assigning 300, though, he could make students feel like 3 or 4 wasn’t enough.</p>
<p>He said he did feel bad for the students who really did do 300, but this was the only way he could get the others to actually read the 20.</p>
<p>My guess? The kids who did the 300 a night usually did not perform as well as those who only did 3. The 300 are probably overloaded with information, and are missing the key concepts, buried in a forest. Those students who were able to select the most important trees and really learn them well probably performed better come exam time.</p>
<p>That may be true to some degree. One of my classes last year had a required reading of some 20 books, an average of at least 300 pages a week or so (just bs-ing here, don’t remember exactly how much). I hardly did any of it, just took notes during class, and did better than most of the students. This year, I experimented with the more difficult technique: actually doing the reading. Yes, it takes time. However, my grade was higher for the class in which I actually did the reading than for the class that I didn’t do the reading in. And I don’t think it was necessarily because the class was easier (I’m not sure if it was), but because I had a better understanding of the material than if I had just taken class notes, therefore allowing me to write better essays and demonstrate a deeper understanding of the text during exams.</p>
<p>I don’t do **** in college- and so far i have done well. i suggest load up with online classes and summer classes…then the rest doesnt really matter because your cumulative GPA wont change much</p>
<p>I think this is true generally, but one has to be careful with which they choose to do this. Usually you can tell by the subject matter of the course, but often you don’t know until the first midterm.</p>
<p>For example, I took a science class last year that basically required you to read every single page of 500 page book to get an A. The professor took out very specific questions from random pages in the book, which made reading every assigned chapter essential.</p>
<p>In contrast, the exams for my compartive politics class last semester contained “big idea” essay questions, and reading the assigned readings was detrimental, if anything, for the reasons you listed.-</p>
<p>I don’t understand how one can choose to achieve a 3.9 (in Engineering). A ~3.9 at my school is top ~1-3% of GPA. A ~3.5GPA is top 15%. As you can see, the spread is huge.</p>
<p>“what school do you go to and what do you major in? Is your major considered one of the more difficult ones at your school? Plus, is your school notorious for grade inflation? How many classes do you take a semester, and what are your significant non-academic activities, if any? Where would you consider yourself percentile-wise in your school in terms of academic intelligence (not necessarily reflected in grades)?”</p>
<p>I had approximately a 3.9, which put me in the top 5% of GPAs at my school. I majored in psychology, which isn’t a hard major, but something I loved and cared about. I tried to take a balance of tougher and easier courses each semester; I did not just coast. I was extremely devoted to my extracurricular activities, especially theater and music, which were more important to me than academics, and I spent probably equal time on activities and homework (probably 15 hours a week each, 20+ during busy periods). I took the standard course load every semester. I would definitely NOT put myself in the top 5% of my class in terms of intelligence…top 25% at best.</p>
<p>The most important factor for me was that I never sacrificed points in any class without a good reason. I went through four years in college without ever turning in an assignment late, and never asking for an extension except for 1 week when my grandmother died. Unless I had an important conflict (my singing group = important), I never missed class. I just tried to do my best on each assignment without sacrificing the rest of my life.</p>
<p>Hmm … I think major has something to do with it. I’m currently an engineering major, which apparently is one of the tougher ones. One of my friends is an English major and has a 3.7 GPA I believe, and he doesn’t do more work than me but I only have a 3.5 atm. Oh well, I’m currently a junior so I still have one year to push that GPA up … lol.</p>