Earning good grades and getting on track for your college graduation is all about creating and maintaining good, healthy study skills throughout your college career. If not, your GPA could suffer, or you could delay your graduation. Here is how to develop good study skills in college.
- Complete all assigned reading.
If you want to do well in college then it’s important that you always do all of your reading. You may feel like you get so much reading that it’s impossible to complete it all, but if you don’t have the time to dig in deep, try skimming some chapters. You can skim through some chapters by reading their intros, titles, the first and last sentence of each paragraph, and the chapter conclusion at the end. Even that much will help you to understand the main gist of the material and keep up with where the class is going.
- Attend lectures.
A lot of professors may not take attendance, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not important to always go to class. On the contrary, it’s extremely important that you attend all of your classes so that you can keep up with the pace of the course. Your professors will assume that you’ve done all of the reading and they will blast through the material very quickly during each lecture, so be sure that you are ready to follow and discuss those topics.Your professor will also be much more accommodating if you visit during office hours for help.
- Take thorough notes.
Once you’ve done the reading and shown up to class, you still have a lot of work to do. You need to be sure to take thorough notes during each lecture so that you can keep that information fresh in your memory. The more ways that you can engage with the material the better your chances will be of remembering the information while you are taking your exams. You will also have a lot more at your disposal when it comes time to study for those exams.
- Review material regularly.
Once you are finished with reading a chapter, attending lecture, and taking good notes, you want to be sure that you understand the material well enough to summarize it all in a chapter review. You should be sure to do this immediately when you’re done with each chapter so that you are ready for your unit exams, but also so that you have plenty of work done already when it comes time to study for finals.
- Find study buddies.
It’s not only important to set aside plenty of time for yourself to study for each of your courses, but for the particularly difficult ones, it’s also necessary to find some good study buddies. Not only will they be able to help you with some of the material that you still don’t understand, but you will also have an even better understanding of the material that does make sense once you’ve taken the time to break it down to someone else. If you are studying to earn UIC’S nursing informatics degree, you are going to want good, focused, high achieving study buddies.