Four Steps to Your First College 4.0 - Step Four

Alright everyone, here is the last step of Four Steps to Your First 4.0. This step will serve as a catch-all for topics I want to throw in and also will include a walkthrough of how I use this method to prepare for exams.

Make Studying a Part of Your Daily Routine

Remember how in the first step of the guide I said I wouldn’t sugarcoat anything? Well it’s true. Depending on the difficulty of your course-load for a given semester, it isn’t unreasonable to say you need to be in the library for at least 2-3 hours M-TH and a longer session (3-5+ hours) on either S/SU. This is of course if you want to get that 4.0.

Of course this amount will vary and I’m sure there are many people here smarter than me who spend half the amount of time in the library as I do. One thing you have to really do regardless of your intelligence though is accept that school really is your job right now. So if you would work for 8+ hours a day somewhere else you need to think about how much time you’re really putting towards your education.

Start Preparing for Exams Roughly Two Weeks Before

I remember when I first read this line in “How to Become a Straight-A Student” and I was shocked. 2 weeks?! Really?? I then proceeded to adopt this strategy and began getting A’s on all of my exams.

Starting to study 2 weeks before an exam doesn’t mean going full cram mode those 14 days, in fact it’s the exact opposite of that. What you really need to do is just devote one hour of each of those days to studying for the specific exam, and by the end you’ll have 14+ hours of studying under your belt. Pair this with the quiz and recall method and you’ll undoubtedly see a grade increase.

Now realistically you’ll begin to feel exactly how long you need to start preparing for different classes. For your really hard classes it might be more than 2 weeks, whereas for easy classes it might be a week or less.

Case Study: Intermediate Financial Accounting

Here is how utilized everything I’ve taught you so far to remain in the top 20% of my accounting class and secure an A.

Step 1: Preparation

Throughout the semester, whenever we were assigned readings, I not only read the chapters, but also simultaneously populated my quizlet set with the terms from the chapter.

Other than this, I did the homework on time, and made sure that I understood the majority of it. If you are struggling in a fairly common course, it might be worth it to buy a Chegg subscription, as if your professor doesn’t offer solutions, you don’t want to be in the dark on how to solve problems.

Step 2: 2 Weeks Before the Exam

For this particular class, I devoted roughly 1.5 hours per day M-TH and 2-3 hours on Sunday. I’d essentially split it up into doing quizlet vocab review for 30 minutes, and then doing practice problems for one hour. So a 2:1 ratio. Different classes will require different ratios!

Step 3: 2 Days Before the Exam

When it gets to being this close to the exam you do want to hike up your studying a tad if you aren’t fully confident on any topics. However if you’ve been consistent you should have roughly 12 hours of studying in already which should be plenty.

Quick Note on Pomodoro Technique

I’m sure many have heard of this technique so I won’t go into too much detail, if you want to read more just go to this website https://cirillocompany.de/pages/pomodoro-technique.

However what I will say is there’s a great chrome extension for it called Strict Workflow which I highly recommend for anyone that utilizes the Pomodoro method.

Alright well here is the end of the guide, thanks for everyone who commented/silver banana’d. I hope these tips and tricks help you like they helped me!

Here are links to the other parts of the guide if you missed them:

Four Steps to Your First 4.0: Step One
Four Steps to Your First 4.0: Step Two
Four Steps to Your First 4.0: Step Three