- #51
ibnsos
gretun said:
I find it very hard to believe that even half the class does these things. I hear from classmates all the time about how hard they study and how they do all the right study methods, usually right before a test as they are cramming.
Take an honest assesment of your study habits; are you watching tv or in a distracting environment when studying; are you socializing while studying; are you working through practice problems; are you reading all the material before the class that covers it and then again after class; are you doing just the bare minimum of homework sets; are you looking up the answers to homework and copying them without fully understanding them; before a test are you reworking problems from homework sets that gave you problems and those you think you understand already; are you doing homework the same day its assigned; have you brought up the issues you have with your instructor during his office hours; have you spent much time in any free tutoring or help centers offered at your school; do you even know if there is free tutoring or help centers at your school; do you sit next to or near that one or two that are getting A's and asked them for help?
I had a math instructor last quarter that almost everyone in the class complained about. They all claimed to study like crazy and it was all his fault they weren't understanding the concepts. Oddly enough, the only time I ever saw any of them taking advantage of office hours and/or free help at our Math Learning Center (MLC) was the day before a test. When I did run across them in the MLC they tended to group together and spend most of their time chatting, trying to learn through osmosis or copying answers from someone else without learning to work through the problems themselves. Even more scary, a few of them had already taken the course twice before.
If neither the instructor, the book or my attempts at working through a problem seem to be giving me a clear understanding I find a few other people that already have the understanding to help me understand the problem. Most of the time there's just some small little issue that I'm missing that I will see in the different methods used by different people that clears the whole issue up for me.
Also, it may just be a case of not really having the fundamentals down from previous courses and you may need to seek remidial help in those areas concurrently with trying to learn the new material. Blame past easy teachers or take it as a learning experience to really learn the material the first time regardless of the grade you recieve.
With the high degree of stress on grades you seem to be putting yourself under it sounds like you may be sabotaging your success. Grades arn't everything. If you look at all those presigious institutes, not all of their students are 4.0. Other things come into play, like research. Like everything else after HS, things arn't going to be handed to you and you will have to work your butt off to get and succeed in research along with course work. You may want to talk to a school counselor about the stress, they are there to help and its foolish not to take advantage of all the programs available to you while in school.
EDT:
Keep in mind, if everyone is doing everything they can, and your all at the average except for a few outliers, why would you expect anything higher than a C? An A grade implies being well above the average, so it would stand to reason that not many would be achieving such a grade.
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) was one of those people. In fact, during one of his engineering classes (he studied both engineering and physics as an undergrad), his professor sat down behind him during the midterms to make sure he wasn't cheating...that is, my husband's scores were always so much higher than everyone else's that the prof's [erroneous] assumption was that he had to be cheating somehow! Lo and behold! Hubby really was that smart.
