How to Become a Straight-A Student

by Cal Newport

  4. Fasten this sheet with a paper clip to the problem set you matched it to in step one.

  In other words, this process transforms your problem sets into mega-problem sets by adding extra problems drawn from your lecture notes. Pretty simple.

  Finally, you must augment your mega-problem sets with technical explanation questions. What are these? For every major topic covered in a particular mega-problem set, jot down a question that asks you to explain the basics of the topic. For example, as Greta from Dartmouth recounts, in an “economics course, I would make study sheets and then add a general question such as: what happens when a government increases spending and lowers interest rates?” Or, for a chemistry class, you might have a problem set containing many questions that require you to draw the molecular structure of specific chemical compounds. In this case, you could add a technical explanation question along the lines of: “Explain the general procedure for drawing a molecular structure, why this is useful, and what special cases must be kept in mind.”

  It’s important that you add these technical explanation questions in addition to your regular sample problems, since they will reveal whether or not you understand the underlying concepts or if you’ve just memorized the steps for some particular problems.

  One last note: If your professor makes a practice exam available, then print out a copy of it and store it with your mega-problem sets. For technical courses, sample exams are a great review tool, and you will definitely want to have them handy when it comes time to study.

  Prepare Memorization Aids

  Both technical and nontechnical courses sometimes require you to do some memorization—formulas, chemical equations, artwork, dates, or chronologies—and the most efficient way to memorize this information is by using flash cards. Almost every straight-A student interviewed for this book used flash cards to help with rote memorization. Fortunately, this technique is easy. Buy a stack of index cards, put the prompt on one side and the answer on the other. Constructing these flash cards, however, can take longer than you might imagine, so start early. If possible, start writing up your cards at least a week before the first day you plan to actually study. The activity is mindless—you can write flash cards while watching TV—so it shouldn’t be too hard to get them done, in advance, bit by bit.

  Schedule Your Organization Wisely

  Don’t try to organize and study in the same day. This is a crucial tactic used by many straight-A students. When you review, you want your brain at full power. If you organize your materials the same day that you review them, your brain will be too tired to accomplish both effectively. So keep these two tasks separate and you’ll end up working more effectively, which reduces the total time spent and produces better results.

  Step 4

  Conquer the Material

  Now it’s time to get down to business. For weeks, you’ve taken smart notes and extracted insights from your assignments. You’ve identified the scope of the exam and organized all the relevant information into study guides or mega-problem sets. Your flash cards are stacked and ready to go. You’re rested. Your time has come. There is nothing left to do but, dare we say it, study.

  This is the step students most commonly identify with exam preparation. It’s also the step that most students misguidedly spend the majority of their time on. You’re not most students—at least not anymore. All of the work you put in up to this point was meant to make this one step as small and painless and insignificant as possible. So don’t worry. There are no all-nighters in your future.

  What follows are powerful techniques for taking your imposing piles of study material and imprinting the key ideas on your mind as efficiently as possible. These techniques are quick but ruthlessly effective. Use them with confidence. They get the job done, and they get it done fast.

  Trust the Quiz-and-Recall Method

  Whether it’s philosophy or calculus, the most effective way to imprint a concept is to first review it and then try to explain it, unaided, in your own words. If you can close your eyes and articulate an argument from scratch, or stare at a blank sheet of paper and reproduce a solution without a mistake, then you have fully imprinted that concept. It’s not going anywhere.

  The same is not true if you merely read over something. Passively reviewing a concept is not the same as actively producing it. Most students make the mistake of relying only on passive review; they read and reread their notes and assignments, and assume that the more they read, the more they will remember. But as Ryan from Dartmouth warns: “Simply reading it over doesn’t work. You have to make the extra effort to get it into your head.”

  Using the Quiz-and-Recall Method for Nontechnical Courses

  To apply the quiz-and-recall method to nontechnical course material, you first need to construct a practice quiz for each chapter in your study guide. Fortunately, the questions for these quizzes already exist, since, if you’ve followed the advice of Steps #1 and #2, all of your notes should be in a question/evidence/conclusion format. Therefore, the quiz for any given chapter can simply contain all of the questions from the notes you took for that chapter. You can be flexible here. If your notes contain some really broad questions—for example, an entire lecture that deals with only one idea—break them up into several smaller questions that, together, cover all of the relevant points. On the other hand, if your notes have a bunch of really small questions, you can combine some into larger questions to save space and time. This process is not an exact science; your goal is simply to produce practice quizzes that cover all the material contained in each corresponding chapter. If you can answer all the questions, then you understand all the big ideas.

  Once you’ve built your practice quizzes, go through them one by one. For each question, try to articulate the matching conclusion and provide some highlights from the supporting evidence. You don’t have to reproduce the material in your notes word for word, but you do need a reasonable summary of the big idea and its support.

  Here’s the important part: Don’t do this only in your head! If you’re in a private location, say your answers out loud using complete sentences. As Lydia from Dartmouth explains: “I find that walking around and saying things out loud commits them to memory in a spectacular way.” If it helps, act as if you’re giving a lecture on the subject. Follow Lydia’s suggestion and pace around while providing your answer. Get your blood pumping. Put some music on in the background. Make it an event. Your study guide was designed to be portable, so it shouldn’t be too difficult to find a place to be alone. For this crucial step, think beyond the library. I used to do this type of review while walking a nature trail on campus. One of the students I interviewed reviews on the treadmill. Be creative. Studying doesn’t have to involve long hours sitting at a desk.

  However, if you are forced to review with other people around and you need to be quiet, then you can write out your answers. “The physical act of writing and the manipulation of the material in my mind was usually enough to keep things straight,” explains Melanie, a straight-A Dartmouth student. You don’t have to format these responses perfectly with correct spelling and grammar, but they must contain all of the pertinent information. No shortcuts. If you don’t say or write it, don’t consider it fully reviewed.

  Next, put little check marks on your quizzes next to any questions that you had trouble answering. Glance through your study guide to remind yourself of the right answers to these questions. Take a quick break.

  Now, repeat the first step, except this time you need to answer only the questions that you marked during your first run-through. Put a new check mark next to the questions that you still have trouble with. Once again, look through your notes to get the right answers, and then take a quick break. Then go back to the practice quiz and try to answer the questions that you marked on your second run-through. You get the idea.

  Repeat this pattern until you complete a run-through without adding any new check mar
ks. At this point, you’re done!

  The power of this approach is its efficiency. You spend the least amount of time with the questions that you understand the best, and you spend the most amount of time with the questions that cause you the most trouble. You also have a definite endpoint. There is no need to wonder how much longer you should continue reviewing. Once you finish a round without any more check marks, you’re finished, and not a minute is wasted.

  Many students are uneasy with how little time is required by this process. They feel like they should continue to review their quizzes, again and again, up until the moment of the exam. This is unnecessary! The quiz-and-recall method is powerful because it does not depend on multiple reviews of the same information. Once you’ve articulated an answer out loud in complete sentences, or recorded it clearly with pencil and paper, it will stick in your mind. As Chris from Dartmouth explains: “[The quiz-and-recall method] takes much less time than people think it does—one day to make the quizzes for the term, and only a few hours to review.”

  Using the Quiz-and-Recall Method for Technical Courses

  The quiz-and-recall method is easily applied to technical courses. You already constructed your mega-problem sets; now you simply need to solve them. Start with the technical explanation questions—thinking about the general concepts first will make it easier to solve the specific sample problems that follow. As with nontechnical courses, try to provide an articulate answer for each problem, and if possible, give your explanation out loud, as if lecturing to a class. Otherwise, write out your answers clearly. Don’t skip any important details.

  Once you’re done with the technical explanation questions, move on to the sample problems. Try to answer each. Again, don’t do this in your head. “I don’t just read the material,” explains Worasom, a straight-A student from Brown. “I write the important equations and concepts out by hand.” Your solutions don’t need to be as detailed as if this was a real assignment, but they should clearly demonstrate that you know what you’re doing. If you can’t explain exactly how you got from the question to the answer, then you don’t yet understand this problem. Be honest with yourself: If you’re just regurgitating memorized solutions, you aren’t prepared to handle new questions on a test.

  As before, check mark the questions that give you trouble. Review the solutions for these questions. Take a break. Then repeat the process, except this time try to answer only the questions you marked on the previous pass. Follow this method until you finish a round with no checked problems. When this happens, you’re done.

  Doris from Harvard explains a final caveat for technical course preparation: “If professors make exams from past years available, these are a terrific resource.” In this case, wait until after you finish your quiz-and-recall, and then try to complete the exam under timed test-taking conditions. Consider this a final check that you understand all of the needed concepts. If you have trouble with a few questions on this practice exam, review them carefully. If you have trouble with a lot of questions on this practice exam, then something went wrong with your previous review, and you need to go back through the material. Work through another round of question answering, and this time really make sure you understand each of the steps. If you still have trouble, then it’s time to seek out help from a classmate or a TA.

  Memorize over Time

  If you have material that must be truly memorized—dates, artists, chronologies, formulas—there are, unfortunately, no real shortcuts. You just have to keep working with your flash cards until you have no trouble providing the right answer, even after you shuffle the cards into a random order.

  Memorization is particularly dependent on your available mental energy. It doesn’t work if you try to commit items to memory for eight hours straight, but it does work if you memorize only an hour at a time and only one or two hours a day. So separate the task of memorizing from your other review. Spread the work out over many days, and never dedicate too much time to any one sitting with your flash cards. Melanie from Dartmouth recalls how some of her peers would “review their flash cards at any opportunity—eating dinner, waiting in line at an e-mail terminal,” which is the most effective way to get through this tedious task and commit the necessary items to memory.

  Step 5

  Invest in “Academic Disaster Insurance”

  Most college students have an exam horror story to tell. These stories always seem to start the same way. The first question on the test is easily solved, you still have plenty of time, and everything feels good. Then you see it—a question that you have no idea how to answer. Leaving it blank will torpedo your grade, and as you sit and stare, the time to solve the other questions quietly slips away. The good feeling is gone, and in its place, panic creeps in. You’ve just experienced an academic disaster.

  Conventional wisdom says that academic disasters are unavoidable. No one can study every single topic, and therefore you are going to get nailed occasionally. But here’s the lesson of Step #5: Don’t believe this.

  Straight-A students have a knack for avoiding rogue questions. It’s as if they invest in some sort of academic disaster insurance: protection against the unexpected return of those obscure topics that slip by when you doze off for a moment in class. In reality, this insurance policy is nothing more than a simple strategy: Eliminate your question marks. This technique can be employed throughout the term and, over time, significantly reduce the chance that you will be baffled by an unexpected exam question.

  Eliminate Your Question Marks

  In Step #1, we covered smart techniques for taking notes in class. If you remember, this strategy suggests that you put a question mark in your notes for any topic that flies by without you really understanding the conclusion. This will occur occasionally in both technical and nontechnical courses—sometimes as the result of your attention wandering and sometimes as the result of the professor heading off on a tangent and not offering a satisfactory explanation.

  These question marks are dangerous. As Christine from Harvard puts it, by skipping a point made in a lecture, “you’re gambling with the possibility of being truly in the dark on the exam.” The scenario is simple. During the semester a few topics slip past your attention in class, so you end up with a handful of question marks in your notes. When it comes time to study, you have more than enough big ideas that you do understand, and that you need to review, so the occasional question-marked topic gets ignored. You enter the exam feeling prepared, and then, as luck would have it, you find yourself face-to-face with a big essay question covering one of those bypassed concepts. Whoops.

  To prevent this from happening, you need to eliminate these question marks. The key is to start this process well before the exam. If you leave all of these question marks unanswered until you start studying, you will end up spending many extra hours looking up the required explanations. Learning a large quantity of material from scratch during the review process is a mistake made by average students—and you should avoid this.

  Instead, try to knock off question marks as soon as they arrive. By the time you begin studying you should, as Robert, a straight-A student from Brown, explains, “have at least a vague understanding of every topic that will be covered on the exam.” The following four tactics, if used regularly, will help you achieve this goal. They provide a solid defense against unclear ideas and will allow you to start the study process with an explanation in mind for all relevant topics.

  • Ask questions during class.

  “When in doubt, I just ask questions in class for more clarification,” explains Worasom from Brown. If a topic slides by you, raise your hand and ask for a clarification. The more question marks you eliminate on the spot, the less work you will have to do later.

  • Develop the habit of talking to your professor briefly after class.

  “Talk to the professor after class, or send him an e-mail asking for clarification about questions that arose during
his lecture,” suggests Jason from Penn. There is nothing unusual about this. Most professors will stick around for five or ten minutes after the bell to answer final questions. Take advantage of this time. When the class ends, head over to the professor and see how many of the question marks of the day you can get eliminated. You should then immediately correct your notes before you forget the explanations. Will this turn you into a brownnoser? No! The brownnosers are those who come up to the professor only to tell him what parts of the lecture they found interesting, or to offer up some of their own “brilliant” thoughts on the topic. You, on the other hand, have a list of focused questions that you want answered, which makes you seem smart, not sniveling.

  • Ask classmates.

  If you’re still unclear, James, a straight-A student from Dartmouth, recommends that you “talk with other people about the topic.” Send an e-mail or corner them in the hall soon after the lecture. If they understand the topic, it will take them only a few minutes to explain it to you while it’s still fresh in their minds.

  • Come prepared to exam review sessions (if offered).

  Many classes offer a formal review session the week before the exam. Go to these. Before you arrive, jot down all of the topics from your notes that you are still unsure about. Then, during the session, try to get all of them answered. Don’t be worried about having a lot to discuss. More often than not, review sessions suffer from too few student questions, so your professor or TA will appreciate your preparation.

  The goal of these defensive tactics is to eliminate your question marks without adding any study time. If, however, despite your best attempts, some of these unclear topics persist until your review, your last-ditch defense is to skim. You probably won’t have time at this point to look up detailed explanations from scratch for every leftover question mark. And, even if you did, the effort would be way too time consuming (remember: Straight-A students avoid long study hours), so skim over just enough material to have something to say for each of these points. On the off chance that one of these lingering question-marked topics comes up on the exam, at least you won’t leave a blank page. But this situation can still be dangerous, so follow the first four strategies to reduce the topics you don’t understand as much as possible before your studying begins.