School has always come easy to me. I’ve never had to work really hard to do well. I’ve got 50 college credits and a 3.9.
But I know engineering is a different kind of difficult. I decided to major in IE.
Do you have any tips, books, or anything to get good grades?
Step 1: stop worrying about being an A+ student. This isn’t high school.
^ That sums it up pretty succinctly. Going for the A+ in everything in college, especially in engineering, is not really worth it. Do as well as you can in as many classes as you can without overexerting yourself.
This is not specific to engineering, but I think one key is to start psets as early as possible / as soon as they are assigned. That way if something is not clear, or you are stuck, you have time to check with the professor or TA for a hint or for help. By the time it is the middle of the night the day before, it is too late. And if the assignment turns out to be harder than you expected, you have time to make adjustments to your schedule. And find a reliable network of other motivated students to check your work against and discuss the problems with.
On tests, try to anticipate what a reasonable test over the subject would cover, based on what you would test if you were teaching the class. Make yourself do some practice problems as if they were a test. Don’t just assume because you read the material and understand it that you can step up and do it on a test. Often we fool ourselves on that front.
In general, try to summarize the material you learn. Nothing like re-writing with your own words to really learn it. And teaching it to someone else, with your copious spare time. (j/k) Make sure to actually go to class, and really be present in the moment during lecture, not messing with your phone or browsing interesting web sites.
My 2 cents.
You can work very hard, be very smart and still not be an A+ student. Your goal should be mastery of the material. A nice side bonus is usually a decent grade, but not always, especially if you go to a school that is known not to grade inflate or even more, to (relative to other schools) deflate.
Here are some general tips, all shamelessly stolen from Cal Newport.
Good luck!
@boneh3ad I guess you’re right, but isn’t GPA everything? I’ve heard so much about how much GPA means to engineers.
Thanks for the advice @inn0v8r and @eyemgh I’ll definitely remember all of that and that’s great advice!
Sure, it’s important, but you can’t keep a 4.0 forever.
GPA isn’t everything. It’s important, but:
My advice is very simple: study well and put in a reasonable amount of effort. Get the grades that are within your reach, accept the fact that you almost certainly won’t have perfection, and focus on other activities.
It’s much more important that you learn something in the class. Your goal is to learn the basics and then learn the applications that they enable so that you can go out into the world and do productive work. You aren’t going to be able to do that as well if you’ve basically stressed yourself out so much that you pass the class but don’t understand the concepts at any depth beyond just memorizing formulae.
@NeoDymium Thanks for the advice!
@boneh3ad You make an excellent point. I wouldn’t have thought of it like that. Thanks!
My D was an A+ student in high school, but she is enjoying B+ to A- in college. She rather likes to spend time in EC than focusing solely on grades. Aiming at A+ is a way to ruin your college life. Her group just finished building a wind turbine for a local public school.
“I’ve never had to work really hard to do well.” - That may change. College is typically more challenging than high school, but even more so in engineering. Good advise above.
What I’ll add is that it is important to “keep swimming”, even if you don’t maintain your historic A+ grades. DD had always gotten A’s in early grades. There was one very hard class where nobody got an A… and she thought she was out of the running even for a B, She gave up trying, thinking she’d get a C. She got a D.
@JoseWhat, what @colorado_mom said is important to internalize. GPA is HIGHLY dependent on factors out of your control. Some classes might not award ANY As. Some might curve around the class average. That usually helps, but if everyone is performing well it could mean 80% is a C. Work ethic, organization and a desire to understand as your primary motivation will very likely put you in a respectable grade strata as a secondary result. Good luck.
For what it’s worth, I don’t know any engineering professors who still apply a bell curve around the class average as far as I know. Most that I know do some variation of the 10% scale while reserving the right to adjust that scale based on class performance at the end of the semester. Most of those tend to also say that they will never adjust the scale to make your grade worse than what the original scale would give you (i.e. if you get an 80% or higher, you are guaranteed at least a B).
Now, the list of professors that I know hardly constitutes a representative sample of all professors, but I still firmly believe that the practice of curving is not not nearly as common as it used to be. Besides, if a professor is doing a good job of teaching, then grades will not be normally distributed anyway (generally would have negative skewness) and a bell curve won’t make any sense anyway.
If you just do your best to actually learn and understand the material, the grades will come out in your favor anyway. It may not be straight As and almost certainly won’t be straight A+s, but you will be getting more As than Bs if you are doing a good job with that, and that is very good for an engineering degree. Shoot, I got slightly more Bs than As when I was an undergraduate (I think, don’t actually remember my exact GPA) and still made it into a great graduate program and finished that just fine. Grades aren’t everything.
Just a few quick thoughts on this perspective. I hear it a lot - it seems to be the general advice on how to be a good student in college. On the surface, there’s nothing really wrong with these ideas, because it is in general good advice: start early enough to finish, get help when needed, and have a structured system of review. But, at least for me, it has one fatal flaw: when it comes down to it, I’m just not going to follow it (can’t, or won’t, or probably both). During my time as a student, I did try something very similar, and it was not very effective. My grades didn’t improve much or at all (they were already as high as they could go) and mentally it was just extremely exhausting to try to fit studying into a system like that.
One of the issues is just that mental exhaustion is just as real as physical exhaustion. I never had less than five technical classes (sometimes 7-8, of difficulty varying from “pretty easy” to “very hard”) and this method is not exactly time-efficient. Writing practice problems, spending a lot of time on trying to “figure out” the test, rewriting your notes… all mentally exhausting and not the kind of thing that I’m even remotely interested in doing after a day of 3-4 difficult lectures, at least one of which goes over my head. And if I didn’t do something at what could be called the “last minute” I would end up stressing way too long over it and my performance wouldn’t improve.
Do I think that people should abandon these ideas and do what I did, which could very fairly be characterized as bad habits? Absolutely not. It worked for me because of a few things that are not true for most: I already had a very good idea of what test questions would look like because I had been writing exams for others since high school, I could usually keep up in class, I could very accurately estimate how long it should take to complete an assignment just by looking at it (unless it was a particularly nasty math class, which were completely unpredictable). But I do have one very simple point to make:
Know your strengths and weaknesses, and do what works for you. If you work better and get better results with “bad habits” than with “good habits” then those aren’t bad habits for you. Often, especially in academics, less is more.
I should also point out that what you think is best for you is not always actually best for you. Many people will swear by the practice of doing copious example problems on a topic until you’ve drilled it into yourself so hard that you remember it, but research has shown that this is largely wasted effort and doesn’t even work all that well. You are far better off studying a given topic in relatively short spurts and moving onto another topic, then coming back to the first and so on. This can certainly include doing practice problems, but avoid doing them in long, single-topic marathons. Cramming is ineffective.
Believe it or not there was an engineering professor at Cal Poly last year who curved around an 82% average. It created a little firestorm on Reddit.
For me the best method was to do all the problem sets (whether they were collected for a grade or not) as they were assigned. Some friends waited til just before the test (or the final) , but at that point you’ve lost the opportunity to build upon the learning.