How to Improve Your Grades in 5 Easy Steps?
Updated: June 19, 2024
Published: March 2, 2019
College students require good grades to stay enrolled in their schools, maintain financial assistance or scholarships, and even graduate. Undergraduates also need to maintain strong GPAs if they want to proceed with a graduate program. But how do you improve your grades and maintain good grades?
Whether you’re struggling to get good test scores in your course or want to improve your grades, there’s always room for improvement. However, passing your course does not happen through magic; it requires self-awareness, motivation, and dedication. Once you determine the reasons behind your academic struggles and take action, you’ll be more prepared to enter the career world and be successful on other fronts.
So, are you unsure of how to go about improving your grades? Here’s how to improve your grades and become a highly successful student.
Motivate Yourself and Embrace a Positive Attitude
It’s only human to get disappointed in yourself, whether you have lower-than-expected grades or are simply unsatisfied with your grades. Don’t get down or give up on yourself; try motivating yourself and eliminating negativity surrounding your mental attitude.
Having a positive attitude around your challenges is the first step to working on how to get good grades. Start by believing in yourself and encourage yourself to focus on your academics. Instead of constantly thinking of failure, determine your academic goals and use them as your motivation to get your grades up.
Determine Where You’re Falling Short and Target Those Areas
Do you need to improve your grades across all your classes or want to get your grades up in one class? Which subjects are a challenge to you? If you want to know how to improve your grades, assess your past and current GPA patterns, and figure out the areas you’re currently underperforming, and why. You might want to address your challenge if you detect an overall decline in your performance in any subject or class.
Once you determine the areas you need to focus more on, you can create a plan of action that will work best for your challenges. Are your studying techniques and behaviors working for you? Think about reasons hindering you from attaining your full academic potential in the specific areas you’ve identified.
Analyze what works for you and what doesn’t work for you and take action to ensure you improve your scores. If all the subjects you’re taking present a challenge, it’s crucial that you detect early enough so that you can choose the suitable courses that are in line with your goals.
Attend Your Classes and Review the Syllabus
It might sound simple, but attending classes and taking good notes is an obvious first step if you’re looking to know how to get your grades up. A recent study by THE PENN shows that there’s a definite correlation between class attendance and grades or test scores. Moreover, attending classes can also be part of your final grade in some courses, and missing classes could automatically reduce your grade.
On top of that, reviewing your course syllabus after attending your classes is a significant step to getting your grades up. Most students barely glance at their course syllabus, but the syllabus contains information that could help raise your test score.
Most professors add their grading policies and breakdowns to the course syllabus, including assignments, deadlines, and late penalties. Knowing instances where you might lose grading points, such as not attending classes and turning in an assignment late, can help you raise your grades effortlessly.
Take Advantage of the Office Hours to Ask Questions
Office hours are one of the convenient direct forms of student-faculty interactions in most colleges and universities – they’re crucial for creating a mentorship relationship. Don’t hesitate to ask for help! Take advantage of office hours to communicate with your professors and ask them questions about where they think you can improve in their respective courses and how you can work to achieve good grades. You can also request additional reading materials from your professors to help you re-energize interest in courses that you want to improve your grades.
When you communicate with your professors, they’ll most likely advise you on how to improve your grades based on your academic performance. Research indicates that students interacting with their faculty and receiving advice have higher institutional commitment, translating to academic productiveness. Office hours help develop a student-faculty relationship to improve students’ drive and focus by offering a sense of genuine investment in their academics.
If you’re learning online, you don’t have to worry because universities and colleges still offer office hours online. You can communicate with your professors through email or phone. You can also speak to a personal program advisor to receive academic counseling, including course selection, academic advice, and general encouragement. University of the People, for instance, matches you with an academic advisor from the beginning of the enrollment process as you choose your academic program.
Organize Your Life and Adhere to Your Study Schedule
Have you organized your space and time? Have you developed a study schedule you can follow to avoid being overwhelmed? If you’re looking to get good grades, organizing your life and having a functional study schedule will help you improve your academic performance without straining much.
Besides keeping your reading space decluttered, tidy, and organized, create a daily schedule incorporating your school schedule to help you limit distractions and prioritize your time. You can use a paper planner to manage your time and allocate more time to courses or topics you have identified to be performing poorly, and this will help you boost your grades.
Closing Thoughts
Improving your grades and raising your GPA in college is essential. The good news is, even if you had a rough start, you could still work on your self-improvement to attain better grades that will allow you to continue your studies or get more opportunities in your career.
As you look for ways to get your grades up, it’s important first to determine what courses are challenging you the most and seek extra help in those areas. Paying close attention to your weaknesses and strengths will help you take appropriate steps to improve your grades. Lastly, as you attend your classes, don’t hesitate to seek mentorship help from your professors to help you improve your underperforming courses.