This is fabulous advice, not just for students returning to college, but for ALL students. Thanks for writing it!
One thing that’s told to every student in any college is that for every hour in class you must spend 3 hours outside of class studying. Most students ignore this, and those students typically don’t get A’s unless the class is trivial. Assuming you’re a run-of-the-mill human who like most of us is decidedly average in intelligence, you will not be able to ignore this tip. If you do not put in the hours, especially in your math and science classes, you will not get A’s. This is the biggest killer for students who go on to a 4-year school after community college and find that the courses are much harder.
For your math and science classes it is best to read the material that you will be going over in the next lecture ahead of time while doing the example problems and as many of the end of chapter problems as time allows. Lecture should be used as reinforcement, not the foundation or your intuition. This is the method that education research has shown time and again is the key to great success in science and math courses at the university level. Even if you’re confident in the material, don’t skimp on this way of studying. Remember, the point of studying isn’t to do as little as possible and still do well to stroke your ego, it’s to build good habits so that when you reach material that isn’t your strong suit (and it will come, believe me) then you will have the tools to learn it effectively ahead of time.
Study habits for tests require a bit more strategy. Depending on the class, you could have anything from multiple choice (my chemistry class), to 10 long problems to do in 2 hours (my first physics class). What you should do regardless is try to find an old exam from the professor or build your own exam from the harder questions in your textbooks. You should study these exams by completing them once, checking your mistakes, and retaking them to reinforce in your brain the correct way to do the problems. This was a strategy employed by a UC Berkeley student majoring in finance who got a perfect score on the most failed exam in the school, and was what gave me the skills to do well in classes that are often failed at my Community College.
