Hey friends,
I’m hoping to get some feedback from you all about how you see other straight A students, and what you feel like holds you back from getting straight A’s (or close).
I’m developing a course to help students exceed in school, and I’d love to know what you find to be particularly limiting or difficult so I can address it in my class.
Your feedback is so necessary and much appreciated!
As a student myself I feel like what holds me back at times is my mindset. Sometimes I tend to go to my easy-come-easy-go attitude not minding the consequences of thing which results to procrastination.
I procrastinate and I’m lazy.
I spend hours improving my LoL skills to pick up girls
Procrastinating and/or not keeping up with the class pace (in material) has gotten me sometimes.
In high school I didn’t lose as many points over professors/teachers nitpicking the format and neatness of my handwritten homework assignments / lab reports.
Heck. Went from an A to a B+ over two assignments the professor got picky with my style that did have the right answers. And I’ve gotten an A- in a lab class that I was always dinged on neatness (handwritten reports and didn’t want to waste time writing down all the busywork calculations and using a ruler for straight lines etc).
In one of my GEs, getting an A- because I could care less about the subject matter and not read the book like you’re supposed to do to know the stuff that is on exams.
And the fact that engineering has math that goes over your head and a really large workload especially when I’m graduating in three years.
Short attention span. Calc test? Let’s think about rock climbing!
Also, I get bored if classes are too easy. At that point, short attention span gets shorter, and I do badly.
I take a heavier class load than I should, and something always gets me down in the middle of the quarter, limiting my productivity.
If I could stop being an idiot, that’d be great. But I don’t see that changing anytime soon.
Mechanic’s is always the key =)
My issues is, not putting my all into a class. I’m always telling myself it will all work so I don’t put in the time. Granted I’m passing and finish up my degree within a semester, I wish I could’ve done things different.
Another big one for me is not asking question or meeting up with the teacher to discuss the material. This helped so much because they’re the one that writes the exams lol.
I find it so hard to be intentional about keeping up with the material and pushing through what are often extremely tedious readings. I’ve never experienced the phenomenon of feeling “ready” for an exam, haha; I’m usually doing a lot of cramming in the days before. Also, it’s very hard, even after I’ve shaken myself out of a temporary slump, to figure out how to catch up.
However, I do think that one thing that has contributed to me getting a lot of As (I would, I guess, consider myself close to being a straight-A student) is being able to quickly figure out what works and doesn’t work as far as how to learn, study, and do successful assignments for different professors who all have their own styles of teaching and ways of grading.
Knowing that C’s get degrees (in engineering)…went from straight A+ student in HS to B+ student first semester freshmen year. On a serious note, I think that I went into school not knowing what it takes to get straight As. I didn’t touch a textbook until Mid-October, been fighting an uphill battle since. Finally caught up and now I’m on track again, thankfully. Also, I just struggled with time management in general this first semester. Joined the club hockey team at my school and several other student groups. That, combined with 2nd year classes was just a bad situation that I put myself in. Glad I was in it, though; great learning experience!
If I break my streak this semester, it will be because I have been feeling very tired/unmotivated/burnt out recently. It’s so hard to keep pushing when your eyes are burning and you want to take a nap but you can’t because your every waking moment is spent on something school-related.
For me, I missed up my straight A streak by taking a W and getting a very low B in a math class. In both instances, I tackled a little too much. In one case, I was taking around 21/22 units. My classes weren’t probably all that difficult for more mathematically gifted people (two C++ programming courses, an anthro course, symbolic logic, a language class, and that math class). I found that I simply had next to no time to dedicate to my math class and was always so unprepared for exams. I had something like a 58/100 on our first test and I don’t remember the last time I scored so low on a test.
Wow! I love all of your responses! Thank you.
Procrastination seems to be one of the biggest problems. And funny enough, I’m a huge procrastinator. 
I managed relatively easy A’s at Berkeley taking both grad and undergrad classes while putting everything off till the last minute and I have a stronghold of ingenious ways for improving while still being a procrastinator.
Really excited to share those methods with as many students as possible!
One major skill I want to offer in this course is how to use procrastination in your favor, how to defeat the easier aspects of procrastination that hold you back, and how to get better results while working/studying less (which helps with the whole procrastination thing).
It also sounds like staying motivated is tough. I hear you! Perhaps I should really expand the lesson on how to work less/study less and improve grades. What are you thoughts?
I’ll spend time (ha!) talking about time management, as well as unconventional ways to improve that doesn’t involve academics (ie, actually using those extra curriculars to make you a better student).
@thelaxiankey lol - I totally get that. I actually do my best creative thinking when I’m reading a textbook or novel for class…not the best for studying, but I generate a lot of awesome ideas from my short-attention span. Ha!
@OnMyWay2013 Being able to adapt and know your own learning patterns makes it so much easier to excel. Awesome you’re able to do that. I’m curious to know if major affects how people feel in preparing for tests. I know there’s a big difference in a bio exam vs literature. What major are you?
You’re all so awesome for helping me out!
If there are any other areas I’m missing that would be super helpful to you & my future students, post it up here!
@bodangles I had this issue too, early in my senior year. After dealing with it, I pretty much would call it depressed- in retrospect it was exactly like all of the descriptions of diagnosed depression I’ve ever heard.
The hard part is helping yourself. This is near impossible, but when you do it, you feel incredible. I unsolicitedly suggest you talk to someone; therapist, friend, or family. For me, it was lack of exercise and communication. When I don’t exercise or talk to people, I slowly become numb to everything and just wander. I become detached. Guess what two things I didn’t do during summer… And beginning of senior year, I didn’t exercise, so I was still sad, but I started doing that as well (swimming and running) and now I feel like a human
Everyone’s different with regards to this. I know that for my dad, if he doesn’t go out hiking into the forest every couple weeks, he also gets detached and lonely. So anyway, talk to people. Figure out what helps you, and make sure to do it. You may not want to, you may not see the point, but it will help if you persevere. I know I sometimes hate running - but if I don’t, life’s even worse.
I’m President of my school’s fight club and it’s very taxing.
@preamble1776 lol, I assume it would be. I could devote a lesson alone to fight club survival.
@EssayEnthusiast I’m an applied math major, and definitely the kind of person who learns best by doing lots of practice problems and understanding things that have steps and methods to them. It was because of my learning style that I changed my major from Behavioral Biology; I was getting frustrated and burnt out with having to memorize so many details and piece them all together into concepts that I could regurgitate but not really use. I’m also premed, so I’ve gotten a good mix of science, math, and social science classes / exams.
Social science exams I’ve taken have been boring, but pretty straightforward: know the vocab, different facts, symptoms, species names, etc. Subjects like General Chemistry are a little better, in that there’s some “What will happen if…” questions, but they also include a lot of regurgitation. Math and subjects like organic chemistry have been the most interesting to study, and even though they’re also the hardest to study for, I feel a lot more motivated. I always feel more prepared for these ones because the skills / concepts you learn early on are fundamental to the ones you learn later. The regurgitation-type exams usually mean that I have to go back and learn all the details from up to months ago.
As for humanities exams, no. Just no, lol. I haven’t had a humanities exam since high school (I do have one this semester though). But I remember that they were even worse than regurgitating. When they include writing essays on some component of the literature, how does one practice for that? How does one know whether one is truly understanding the materials and relating details in the correct way (it’s often said that there are no right answers when it comes to interpreting literature, but I tend to use quotes in the wrong way and grossly misinterpret things)? I can do details, and even concepts composed of many details, but I’m terrible at big-picture, “no right answer” kinds of questions.