Five Tips to Help You Get Good Grades: A Guide to College Life

Here are five tips from a successful second year college student to anyone having trouble getting those good grades in higher education. Follow these rules and your professors will love you!  And you are sure to get a great grade in every class!

Tip 1

Make sure you arrive late to class on a regular basis. This will show your professor that even though you obviously have better things to be doing, you still care enough about their class to get there no matter how much time you have to cut out of your daily moisturizing routine or reality TV line-up. They will appreciate your willingness to sacrifice your valuable personal time to come hear what they have to say.

Tip 2

Vigorously argue with the professor about whether or not they are correct on any and every topic covered in class. This will show that you care. That you have a burning desire to understand. However, you don’t want to question his or her expertise, so make sure that all your arguments are poorly founded and completely wrong. Your professor will appreciate the care you have for their ego. They will admire your flawless self-confidence that you so readily and enthusiastically question authority. They will be awed by your moxy. By doing this, you will be making sure that the professor will remember your name and face, so that when it comes to grading assignments the professor will remember that you were so passionate about learning that you took the time to argue for clarification on behalf of the rest of the class by allowing no statement to go unquestioned and your grade will reflect this.

Tip 3

Do not proof read papers or assignments. This shows the professor that you acknowledge that they are more savvy in their fields than you will ever be, and because of this you don’t have the right to feign expertise by turning in an obnoxious, pretentious, correctly formatted, pseudo-professional lie. They will be flattered by your obvious submission to his or her academic superiority, and take the extra time to correct your work, and edit it into a legible addition to the college world.

Tip 4

In compunction with Tip 1, alternately do not show up to class at all. This shows the professor that you have equal respect for the value of their personal time. So much respect that you are willing to pay tuition, then not show up to a class so that the professor has to spend less time teaching in class, and more time to devote to their hobbies like reading academic journals and grading papers.

Tip 5

Make sure you wait until the last minute to ask for clarification in the syllabus or on an assignment. There is no better way to show that you respect your professors valuable time, and his or her work obligations, than by waiting until the day before something is due to ask for help. This will show your professor that you respected them enough to spend the three weeks since this was assigned trying to muddle through it yourself, even though you never understood it. He or she will admire your independence and rush to get you everything you’ll need to get the assignment completed on time—they might even give you an extension!

College: It is hard

So this college thing. It’s kinda hard.

I know, that’s a grossly obvious understatement. Honestly, though, there’s no other adjective that fits for the experience of higher education.

College isn’t hard just academically, either. Because it is. But more so, it is a trying, stressful, nerve-wracking and endlessly exhaustive social battle that is bound to leave one insecure and not a little psychologically disturbed. Not to say that it isn’t fun, God it can be fun, but for every moment of fun you manage to squeeze out of the machine, you have ten-fold that in hair-splitting anxiety. Of course, this assertion is debatable, but examine below these common collegial situations before making judgment.

The Dining Hall: This is a place in which every college student spends tremendous amounts of time. And honestly? The College Student has no choice in this matter. The College Student is poor, The College Student is busy and The College Student is going to gain ten pounds because the only place to eat (The Dining Hall) is a cesspit populated by deep-fryers, prepackaged and sugary snacks, a veritable fount of soft drinks, all topped off with a heaping dosage of social judgment and shame.

This is a rundown of the typical experience at The Dining Hall. First, after an extraordinarily long amount of time has passed between this and the last meal, The College Student has no choice to venture out from the Residence Hall/Classroom (See below). The College Student will then enter The Dining Hall and be presented with a vision of flashy and intimidating images of edibility. Said vision will present itself in three different groups. A) the Grill—or fast food, Burger King-esque fair, tastes wonderful at the moment, but  leaves a greasy lump of self-recrimination in its wake. B) TO-GO—or the easiest, quickest choice that allows for the least amount of terror, easiest escape and highest levels of guilt springing from social-cowardice and exorbitant sodium levels. Finally, C) the Salad Bar—full of half-wilted lettuce and inspiring of brief pride in oneself, then, after instilling a patina of self-worth on the college student, creating a target for hostile judgment from the Other College Students who assume that The College Student thinks they are better than The Others.

The college student will not escape without being subject to judgment and agonizing regret.

The Residence Hall: The Dorm. The place of sleeping, or of not sleeping.  The place that is full of Other College Students for The College Student to make merry and celebrate the awesome-ness of being College Students. It is also the location at which Sex Occurs. Also, Intoxication.  And copious amounts of Hilarity Ensuing (In certain situations, Good Grades may also be a common attribute of success).

For the College Student to fit in well at The Residence Hall Sex must Occur often, Intoxication must be at least bi-weekly and The College Student must take an active part in ensuring that Hilarity will indeed Ensue. Due to the fact that an individual managing all this is both impossible and hazardous to the College Students health, the successful completion of attaining these attributes is unlikely for the common College Student. While striving to attain them, The College Student will stretch the bounds of confidence, physical endurance and psychological soundness. None of which will be intact by graduation and/or dropping out. Hence, in any social situation, The College Student will be plagued by feelings in inadequacies for the remainder of their adult lives, spurred by the experience of college.

The Classroom: This is where The College Student will do his or her “learning.” The ratio between actual learning and perpetual social agony: About 3-to-1. For every three classes The College Student attends, only one class will be contain any actual learning. Please, do not mistake this for a criticism of the instructors; this unfortunate truth is due in most part to the efforts put forth by the students. The students will either waste time attempting to impress The Others with their rapier wit (i.e. when Sex Occurs, also Intoxication and the Ensuing of Hilarity) or they will attempt to assert their dominance over the Others by displaying the knowledge previously gained by prior educational experiences. This is otherwise known as “bragging.” Any Students that do not participate in this become invisible to The Others, and then spend the entirety of the term trying to not be quite so invisible, to little or no success. In any case, this phenomena causes a colossal waste of time that is spent by the instructor both mocking the College Students for their feeble efforts as acting grown-up (all in good fun, and thrilling to watch) and by the instructor correcting the false assumptions of prior educational experiences.

Due to the pathetic state of public education, a great amount of time also has to be spared in order to teaching how to think, and in promoting individual thought via class discussion. Only a grand total of four students will ever participate regularly in these discussions (the former braggers) and only another six will ever pay very close attention to them. The rest will spend the class period surfing the web and checking Facebook. Or posting blog entries.

While the euphoria of academia is undoubtedly indulged during the college experience, and the potential for forging friendships over various felonies is nigh limitless, the exertions to this end will leave The College Student a quivering mass of raw emotions and shattered shards of psyche. Not to fear! There is plenty of hope for The College Student thanks to the fortunate fact that most employers forget what actually goes on in college and assume that graduates have actually learned things in school and aren’t bundles of Nervous Breakdowns waiting to meltdown.