1. Don't procrastinate and get distracted. Even if you're taking hard courses, a college course load is rarely more than 50 hours per week. Average in hard majors is probably 35-40 all-in. That's not onerous at all, especially when you're only working 40 weeks per year (including internship).
2. Concentrate on learning interesting stuff, not on the grades. Good-enough grades (3.5+) will come from this for most people in most circumstances. There are hard-ass professors and even unfair ones (although I never had an unfair professor) but they are very rare and their damage is seriously limited.
I find it odd when college students claim they're going to sue professors over grades. Really? In college you're judged on the average of 30-40 (!) mostly independent grades. If you flunk a class and ace the other 35, you have a 3.89 GPA. In the real world, manager as career-SPOF is pretty much the default.
That said, I dislike grade inflation because it adds to the stress of college. If 2.0 were average, then acing a course could cancel out a failure. (When my parents were in college, a 2.5 was a perfectly respectable GPA and 3.0 was actually good.) With 3.2 as the average, flunking a course cancels out 4 As. That sucks. It makes people risk-averse and stressed out.
I've only had one, and it was in a math course (something I'm usually pretty good with). First, he barely spoke english. Second, he just wasn't a good teacher. He even apologized the last day of class saying how bad a teacher he was and that everyone would at least pass. Nope, he failed almost the whole class.
I retook the class the next semester with a different teacher and aced it.
Oh, I don't know about that. I don't want to get all Kanye about highed ed, but I never understood why university teaching methods are so dependent on the final exam. All the work students do throughout the year is worth very little compared to the final exam. Its a system, imho, that encourages skipping class and binge studying.
It rewards people who can cram well and have good memories, but punishes those who do good work and who aren't good at last minute cram sessions. I've always thought it borderline cruel, especially when the workplace doesn't reflect this. I rarely jerk around M-F and stay up until 4am on Sunday to perform some big task. Its all about rationally addressing problems, breaking them into chunks, and performing those chunks. At universities, its all about irrationally fucking around and doing a last minute cram to get by. I can see why so many talented young men and women would consider dropping out to enter the startup workforce, especially in a down economy that isn't hiring and the sudden realization of having a huge loan debt for the next 10-20 years.
I remember more than a few classes that were structured as 90% final exam and 10% everything else (or more typically 80/20). I never felt this was fair to the student and only encouraged lousy study habits, procrastination, and cheating. Its almost as if the American college experience is one big exercise in not doing things the proper way.
I feel this made me a worse procrastinator than I already was and that it took me several years to shed these bad habits.
Or... it taught you to deal with procrastination head on?
Anyway, this is not universal. My CS program (University of Minnesota) tended to be about 50% assignments / 50% tests. It varied by class of course, theoretical stuff has to go by tests (numerical computing, discrete math, etc). The programming classes sometimes had competitions for bonus points, optimizing a C program in machine architecture, or a head-to-head game competition between programs (that was super fun, and really cut my cleverness down to size).
The technical school I went to gave finals a low weight. You could phone it in and not change much, or you could do really well and bump your course average up a point.
they have software where you can set up a flashcard system if you know what you are doing, and it will time out when you should review what for optimal memorization
1. Don't procrastinate and get distracted. Even if you're taking hard courses, a college course load is rarely more than 50 hours per week. Average in hard majors is probably 35-40 all-in. That's not onerous at all, especially when you're only working 40 weeks per year (including internship).
2. Concentrate on learning interesting stuff, not on the grades. Good-enough grades (3.5+) will come from this for most people in most circumstances. There are hard-ass professors and even unfair ones (although I never had an unfair professor) but they are very rare and their damage is seriously limited.
I find it odd when college students claim they're going to sue professors over grades. Really? In college you're judged on the average of 30-40 (!) mostly independent grades. If you flunk a class and ace the other 35, you have a 3.89 GPA. In the real world, manager as career-SPOF is pretty much the default.
That said, I dislike grade inflation because it adds to the stress of college. If 2.0 were average, then acing a course could cancel out a failure. (When my parents were in college, a 2.5 was a perfectly respectable GPA and 3.0 was actually good.) With 3.2 as the average, flunking a course cancels out 4 As. That sucks. It makes people risk-averse and stressed out.