1. Reading for A's

When you fail an exam, or when you are lagging behind your classmates in studies, you surely will want to catch up with them. But how? This article discusses three study methods that may lead you to success at college.

Where and when and what you study are all important. But the neatest desk and the best desk light, the world's regular schedule, the best leather-covered notebook and the most expensive textbooks you can buy will do you no good unless you know how to study. And how to study, if you don't already have some clue, is probably the hardest thing you will have to learn in college. Some students can master the entire system of imaginary numbers more easily than other students can discover how to study the first chapter in the algebra book. Methods of studying vary; what works well for some students doesn't work at all for others. The only thing you can do is experiment until you find a system that does work for you. But two things are sure; nobody else can do your studying for you, and unless you do find a system that works, you won't get through college.

Meantime, there are a few rules that work for everybody. The first is don't get behind. The problem of studying, hard enough to start with, becomes almost impossible when you are trying to do three weeks' work in one weekend. Even the fastest readers have trouble doing that. And if you are behind in written work that must be turned in, the teacher who accepts it that late will probably not give you full credit. Perhaps he may not accept it at all.

Getting behind in one class because you are spending so much time on another is really no excuse. Feeling pretty virtuous about the seven hours you spend on chemistry won't help one bit if the history teacher pops a quiz. And many freshmen do get into trouble by spending too much time on one class at the expense of the others, either because they like one class much better or because they find it so much harder that they think they should devote all their time to it. Whatever the reason, going whole hog for one class and neglecting the rest of them is a mistake. If you face this temptation, begin with the shortest and easiest assignments. Get them out of the way and then go on to the more difficult, time-consuming work. Unless you do the easy work first, you are likely to spend so much time on the long, hard work that when midnight comes, you'll say to yourself, "Oh, that English assignment was so easy, I can do it any time," and go on to bed. The English assignment, easy as it was, won't get done.

If everything seems equally easy (or equally hard), leave whatever you like best until the end. There will be more incentive at half past eleven to read a political science article that sounded really interesting than to begin memorizing French irregular verbs, a necessary task that strikes you as pretty dull.

In spite of the noblest efforts, however, everybody does get a little behind in something some time. When this happens to you, catch up. Don't skip the parts you missed and try to go ahead with the rest of the class while there is still a big gap showing. What you missed may make it impossible, or at least difficult, to understand what the rest of the class is doing now. If you are behind, lengthen your study periods for a few days until you catch up. Skip the movie you meant to see or the nap you planned to take. Stay up a little later, if you have to. But catch up.

The second rule that works for everybody is don't be afraid to mark in textbooks. A good student's books don't finish the term looking as fresh and clean as the day they were purchased: they look used, well used. Some sections are underlined. Notes are written down the margins. Answers to some of the questions are sketched in. In fact, the books look as though somebody had studied them ... To get your money's worth from your textbooks, you must do more with them than just read them.

To begin with, when you first get a new textbook, look at the table of contents to see what material the book covers. Flip through the pages to see what study aids the author has provided: subheadings, summaries, charts, pictures, review questions at the end of each chapter. After you have found what the whole book covers, you will be better prepared to begin studying the chapter you have been asked to read.

Before you begin reading the chapter, give it the same sort of treatment. Skim through the first and last paragraphs; look with more care at the subheadings; if there are questions at the end of the chapter, read them first so you will know what points to watch for as you read. After you are thus forewarned, settle down to the actual business of reading. Read the chapter all the way through, as fast as you comfortably can. Don't mark anything this first time through except the words that are new to you. Circle them. When you have finished the chapter, find out what these unknown words mean, and write the definitions in the margin opposite the word.

Then look again at the questions, seeing whether you have found the answers to all of them. Guided by the things the questions emphasize and your knowledge of what the whole chapter covered, go rapidly through the chapter again, underlining the most important points. If the chapter falls into three major divisions, underline the three sentences that come closest to summing up the idea of each division. Number these points in the margin: 1, 2, 3. For each major point you have numbered, underline two or three supporting points. In other words, underline the sections you think you might want to find in a hurry if you were reviewing the chapter.

What happens in class the next day, or whenever this assignment is discussed, will give you some check on whether you found the important points. If the teacher spends a lot of time on a part of the text you didn't mark at all, probably you guessed wrong. Get yourself a red pencil and mark the teacher's points. You can make these changes during the study time you have set aside for comparing class notes with the textbook.

One word of warning: don't underline everything you read. If you mark too much, the important material won't stand out, and you will be just as confused as if you had not marked anything at all.

The third rule useful to everybody is don't let tests terrify you. If you have kept up in all your classes, if you have compared your class notes with your texts, if you have kept all your quizzes and gone over your errors, if you have underlined the important parts of each chapter intelligently, the chances are good that you can answer any questions the teacher will ask.

Being fairly sure that you can answer all the questions, however, is not the same thing as answering them. Nothing is more frustrating than freezing up during an important test, knowing all the answers but getting so excited at the sight of the test that half of what you actually know never gets written down.

Do you know the story of the lecturer who cured his stage fright by pretending that all the people listening to him were cabbages? A head of cabbage is no more capable of criticizing a lecture than cabbage soup would be. And who's afraid of a bowl of borsch? You might adapt this system to taking tests. Pretend that the test is only a game you are playing to use up an idle hour. Pretend that your test score is no more important than your score in canasta last night. But you tried to win at canasta; try for as high a test score as you can get without frightening yourself to death.

One way to insure a good score is read the entire test before you answer any questions. Sometimes questions that come near the end will give clues to the answers on earlier questions. Even if you don't find any answers, you can avoid the error of putting everything you know into the first answer and then repeating yourself for the rest of the test.

Be careful, too, not to spend all your time on one question at the expense of the others. If you have sixty minutes to finish a test that contains ten questions, plan to spend five minutes on each question and save ten minutes at the end to read through what you have written, correcting silly mistakes and making sure you have not left out anything important. If some of the questions seem easier than others, answer the easiest first. There is no rule that says you must begin at the beginning and work straight through to the end. If you're going to leave something out, it might as well be the things you aren't sure of anyway.

Following these three suggestions, reading through the test, budgeting your time, doing the easy part first, will not guarantee A's on all your tests. To get A's on essay tests, you must be able to write well enough that your teacher is convinced you do understand. What following these suggestions can do, however, is help you make the most of what you know.

From Background for Writing, Random House, 1967.