Beyond the parties: study habits and grades

As I mentioned in a previous post, regardless of how you feel about a class, the grade goes on your transcript if you don't drop it. That means if you get an F or even a C in a class, that low grade will continue dragging your cumulative grade point average down unless you repeat the course and replace the grade. (Not all colleges will even replace the lower grade with the new grade. For example, Penn State University counts the grade for the repeat and the previous grade in the student's GPA.)
Here's something else a lot of students don't realize about grades: if you take courses at one college and transfer them to another college, keep in mind that the only college that can post grades for those courses is the college where you attended the course. If you transfer course credits to a new institution, the credit transfers and that course may be counted toward your degree requirements, but those other courses will not count in your GPA at the new school. Depending on how you feel about those grades, this could seem good or bad, but it is what it is. Also, this doesn't mean that the school you transfer to doesn't care about your other grades. Not to pick on Penn State, but the admissions counselors there will actually recalculate a student's GPA based on their relatively unforgiving grading policy of averaging repeated courses together and that recalculation sometimes means that someone who thought they made the cut didn't. This is especially true for students with their sights set on the highly desirable College Park campus.

Now that I've shared bad news about grades, I'm happy to let you know that there is hope for redemption for the academically scarred. If the revelings of your wild youth obscured your true academic potential and you've reformed, most colleges and universities will allow you to be considered for some form of an academic restart. In other words, they perform the equivalent of what Tyler Durden in Fight Club does to the credit card companies on your transcript: you start over from zero. That means everything goes: the good grades and the bad.

Do yourself a huge favor and always allow at least one hour of study time for every hour in class. Most advisors recommend two hours of study time for every hour in class. If it's a hard class, you should plan on studying even more. By the way, this applies to everyone, especially people who didn't have to study in high school. If you didn't have to study in high school, you're even worse off because you don't know how to study when you get to college. It's funny how that works, isn't it? The smart people are usually at a greater disadvantage than the average during the first year of college because they aren't used to working at the whole school thing.

This all comes down to some boring, but important advice:

• complete all assigned readings before class
• take good notes
• review your notes
• study
• always check your grades at the end of the quarter or semester