Before we tell you the golden tips to help you get better grades, let’s first start by discussing what it means to be a student because after all, you need to be reminded why you’re reading this article in the first place.
I’m sure you can agree that the ultimate goal among all is to earn good grades so that you can receive the certificate, diploma, or degree—that you’ve worked so hard for. You so much money and time at educational institutions developing new skills and gaining new experiences to prepare yourself for what’s to come afterwards—hopefully, a high-paying job. That’s your goal as a student; to finish school and find a job but in order to do so, everything falls back on how good your grades are.
I mean, the whole graduate and find a job process sounds simple but it’s really not. Any struggling student knows that there are a lot of factors that can prevent you from getting good grades in your classes. All you can really do is try to control as many of these factors as possible.
In this article, I’ve compiled 5 tips that will help you get better grades by teaching you how to overcome common obstacles you will definitely face during your time as a student. Since we are a tech blog, we’ve incorporated the tech tools you’ll need to assist you with these tips.
This guide will show you:
- how to be a better student
- how to do well in college or university
- and how to get good grades
Let’s go!
Taking control of your productivity
Productivity—it’s what dictates how stressed you are, but also how accomplished you feel. You become productive by making good use of your time, except, being productive is not easy. As Oliver Emberton explains in his answer to the question “How Do I Get Over My Bad Habit of Procrastination” on Quora, the reason it’s difficult for many humans to be productive is because we have both a rational side and an impulsive side to our brains. Of course, most of us tend to listen the impulsive more than the rational, thus causing us to be less productive than we potentially can be.
Learning how to be productive is an essential step to take in order to get better grades. It’s much easier for you to be productive when you know exactly what you need to accomplish each day. This brings us to the Ivy Lee Method—something I learned recently that’s been helping me accomplish more tasks on a daily basis. It involves creating a to-do list every morning of no more or less than six items, sorting them by priority, and getting through as many of them as you can. Anything that’s left over by the end of the day gets carried over to the following day. Turning this method into a routine will keep you aware of what’s important—that way you’re never behind on anything in school.
This tip actually leads to amazing study techniques as well because you can list down your primary study topics and go through them one by one.
To assist you with keeping track, you can use an app called Todoist to create electronic to-do lists which can be synced across multiple devices. That way you have a copy on your desktop, laptop, and smartphone.
Learn how Todoist + the Ivy Lee method used together can help you become more productive.
Waking up on time for your classes
For students, sleep is considered a luxury due to back-to-back assignments, readings, projects, and preparation for exams. The worst of it all is that sometimes you’re forced to take early morning classes because a) there are no other time slots available for those classes or b) the afternoon classes are full. Once you’re registered into these morning classes, it becomes mandatory that you attend, otherwise, you’d risk missing out on important lectures, details of upcoming assignments and perhaps even attendance marks. Sometimes you may even fall victim to naps; what was supposed to be a 15-minute nap turned into a 2-hour sleep.
Even though you know the importance of attending lectures, waking up for them isn’t always easy since school-work leaves you sleep-deprived. This is why you hit the snooze button on your phone or alarm clock numerous times before getting out of bed—or are too unconscious to hear the alarm altogether. I mean, what’s the point of attempting to get better grades when you can’t even wake up on time for the lectures? One of the obvious keys to doing well in school is actually attending school.
If sleeping through classes is something you can relate to, there’s an app that can ensure that you will always wake up for your morning classes or from any afternoon naps. It’s called Alarmy. In addition to waking you up to a loud alarm, you’ll have to perform an action to dismiss it. These actions include doing math problems, shaking your phone, and scanning bar codes.
You can read more details about the app here.
Utilizing Google Tricks
Another important tip for to get better grades is learning how to use Google properly. Google is a fascinating search engine. It provides you with links that relate to your search phrases—most of the time. There are some occasions where it’s very difficult to find specific results because Google may conduct searches on your keywords separately. The reason is because most people don’t actually know how to use Google. You may very well be on that boat.
There’s so much more to the search engine than typing in a phrase and clicking the “Google Search” button. Did you know you can restrict certain words from appearing in the search results by using the minus(-) symbol? How about setting your search results to only display content from by specific website by inputting “site:(-insert link here-)” before your search phrase? If you didn’t know these two tricks, you’re not taking full advantage of the search engine.
There is a list full of tricks out there and all of them very easy to learn and remember. Knowing how to utilize them will help you with any assignments that involve research.
Click here to learn more valuable Google Tricks.
Typing out your notes more quickly
Depending on your professor, the rate at which you need to type your notes will vary. If your prof talks slowly, you should be okay, but if he spews out 30 important sentences a minute, you’re in trouble. The slower you type, the harder it will be for you to keep up, that’s why training yourself to type quicker is important.
Aside from notes, typing quickly will also help you save time when you’re doing anything that involves typing—such as essays and sending emails. You’ll be able to fly through that essay much quicker with fast fingers typing away on your keyboard.
Keybr.com is an excellent website that you can use to train yourself to type more words per minute. It uses a sophisticated algorithm in order to provide you with typing lessons that match your skills. These lessons aren’t just random characters either because that’s just boring. Most of the time, Keybr uses actual words that you can pronounce. By practicing on Keybr for 15 minutes a day, a few times a week, you’ll become a faster typer in no time.
If you’re a millennial student that still doesn’t know how to touch type, there’s something wrong. These are skills that you’re eventually going to have to develop so be sure to check out this Quick Typing Tutorial.
Making Fewer Writing Mistakes
When you’ve spent a ton of time writing pages upon pages of content for your assignments, the last thing you want is for grammar mistakes to cost you marks. Even the best writers make mistakes and that’s why it’s important for you to check your work before handing it in. However, doing it manually is tough and you won’t always have someone to help you proofread. That’s where tech comes in.
Typical spell-checkers can’t really do much for you aside from checking spelling mistakes, which is we’re going to stay away from those. Instead, I’m going to introduce you to something called Grammarly—a piece of software that will help you eliminate writing errors, enhance clarity and meaning, and ultimately become a better writer. It also works magically on the—fly making suggestions for corrections as you type. It’s especially useful if you’re trying to get better grades because most of the work we hand in are written assignments, and written assignments require proper use of grammar.
Grammarly can be installed on Google Chrome, Windows or Mac. Here’s are the links to them all:
Grammarly for Google Chrome
Grammarly for Windows
Grammarly for Mac
Unblocking websites at school
I hope that after reading this article, you realize that although there are many factors that can prevent you from doing well in school, there are always ways around them. Part of the journey of a student is to learn how to solve problems along the way. With a little know-how and help from tech, anything is possible. These tips might not help you get a perfect grade on every assignment, but it will definitely show you how to be a better student.
Have additional thoughts on how one can use tech to get better grades? Leave a comment below! We’d love to hear what you think.
