essay about having good grades

But it is vital that you do the following:

• Develop the mindset and motivation to work hard
• Spend your limited time as effectively as possible to get the best results

That's what this guide is about.

I'm a very straightforward person, and I speak my mind. This means that some advice might rub you the wrong way. If that's the case, try to focus on the bigger picture and on the advice you do like. I don't want you to throw the baby out with the bathwater just because you think I'm a jerk. My focus is on helping you do better, and one of the best ways is to share my experiences honestly, warts and all.

I did indeed go through a lot of stress in high school and put in a ton of effort. I think I was obsessive about achievement and have a high capacity for mental pain, and I happen to love working hard. I don't think it's optimal for most students to do what I did and feel what I felt, and I'll explicitly point this out at places. So just because I describe my experience doesn't mean I always condone it for everyone.

If you're aiming for a 4.0 GPA, I'm guessing you also want to get into top schools in the country, so I'll orient this guide toward both goals. That said, I want to stress that a 4.0 is not required to get into top schools like Harvard and Princeton. You do not need perfect grades and test scores to get into the Ivy League. In fact, the average unweighted self-reported GPA of incoming students at Harvard is 3.95 . Thus, a 4.0 is really not that different from a 3.9 from the eyes of the college.

Do not freak out if you have high college goals and don't already have a perfect GPA. It's nowhere near the end of the world. I explain more about why in my guide to getting into Harvard .

The 4.0 number is not all you should aim for— the rigor of your coursework makes a big difference (this is where the concept of the weighted GPA comes in). Ideally, you'll take difficult courses and excel in them. But if you have to make a tradeoff, I'd lean toward the more difficult courses; a letter grade of a B in an AP class is better than an A in a regular class.

Despite the title of this guide, the concepts are widely applicable to GPAs in all ranges. Even if you're not aiming strictly for a 4.0, applying the advice here will get you closer to a 3.8 GPA or a 3.0 GPA or wherever you're aiming. You can use all the strategies here to improve your grades and raise your GPA. This is geared toward high school students, but for readers currently in college, the concepts apply equally to you and often even more so since you don't have as much parental structure over your work.

This guide targets high-achieving students who want to aim for academic success and push themselves to be better. As weird as it sounds, this is not the stance everyone should take. Yes, I know how stressed out students are these days about getting into college. No, I don't think everyone should feel as though they need to get into Stanford. Everyone has different academic goals, and this guide isn't for everyone.

I don't think everyone should aim for the toughest course load and perfect grades. Not enough students and families make decisions for personal happiness and are in a state of constant stress, especially if they always feel as if they're not doing enough. This can have bad long-term consequences. (In fact, applying the advice below should actually make your academic life easier because you're spending your time more effectively.)

That said, I do believe there are huge benefits to academic success. Not only does it lead to obvious benefits like better colleges and more rewarding careers, but it also trains fundamental skills that are applicable to improving the rest of your life.

When I was in high school, I knew I wanted to get into a top school like Harvard, and I knew I was willing to endure the sacrifices and pain to get there. I cared deeply about my academic success and I constantly pushed myself to get better. If this sounds like you and you honestly want to get a 4.0 for good reasons, then you'll vibe strongly with my advice.

Yes, I know there are other things in life that are more important than getting into the best college. But I also know it's a valuable goal for many of you, so I'm orienting this guide toward that. When you hear me say, "Do this to improve your college application," you should read this as, "Do this if college admissions is an important goal to you."

Finally, I co-founded a company called PrepScholar . We create online SAT/ACT prep programs that adapt to you and your strengths and weaknesses . While you do not need to buy a full prep program to get a great score, I believe PrepScholar is the best SAT program available right now, especially if you find it hard to organize your prep and don't know what to study. In any case, the fact that I run a test-prep company doesn't really affect my advice below.

I hope you're still with me and that the above cleared up some concerns you had coming into this article. Now, let's get started.

What Roles Do Coursework and GPA Play in College Admissions?

To understand how colleges think, it's important to put yourself in their shoes. I explain this in more detail in my guide on getting into Harvard and the Ivy League . In short, colleges want to admit students who are going to change the world.

But how do you predict who's going to change the world when applicants are just 17-18 years old? By using their past achievement as a predictor of future achievement.

Admissions offices at colleges do a lot of research on what types of students they admit and how to predict which students are going to be most successful. Often in these studies, high school coursework has one of the strongest correlations with college grades.

The Dean of Admissions at Harvard has stated the following about the admissions process:

"We have found that the best predictors at Harvard are Advanced Placement tests and International Baccalaureate Exams, closely followed by the College Board subject tests. High school grades are next in predictive power, followed by the SAT and ACT."

The Dean of Admissions at Lawrence University , too, has commented on the importance of GPA in college admissions:

"In the majority of studies, high school grades have the strongest correlation with college grades. The SAT and ACT have the next strongest correlation, but this too is not surprising because they have a strong correlation with high school grades."

This isn't very surprising. It takes a lot of skill and effort to excel with a demanding high school course load. The qualities that bring success in high school—curiosity, motivation, hard work, good planning, time management, control of your own psychology—are likely to lead to success in both college and your career. These are all qualities I'm going to cover in this guide.

As you can see, your high school coursework is one of the most important pieces of your college application. In terms of time expenditure, it's by far where you'll be spending the most time: more than 2,000 hours per year at 180 school days * (7 hours/day in school + 4 hours of homework). This is equivalent to a full-time job!

Finally, just to beat a dead horse, here are snippets from admissions offices at top colleges on the importance of coursework in college applications:

"The high school transcript is almost always the most important document in a student's application. But it is hard to conceive of a situation in which the appearance (or absence) of any one particular class on a transcript would determine the applicant's outcome ... When the admissions committee looks at your transcript, it will not focus on whether you have taken any specific course. It will be far more interested to see that you have challenged yourself with difficult coursework, and have done well."

"There is no single academic path we expect all students to follow, but the strongest applicants take the most rigorous secondary school curricula available to them. ... Although schools provide different opportunities, students should pursue the most demanding college-preparatory program available, consistent with each student's readiness for particular fields of study."

"We give the greatest weight to your academic transcript. The rigor of the courses you've taken, the quality of your grades and the consistency with which you've worked over four years give us the clearest indication of how well you will do at Amherst."

Claremont McKenna

"While there is no minimum GPA requirement, competitive candidates for admission pursue the most demanding coursework possible and receive strong grades. We strongly recommend taking advantage of honors and advanced placement coursework when available. Many competitive applicants often go beyond the minimum recommended program."

Once again, don't get the wrong idea. "Most rigorous secondary school curricula" does not mean "take every AP class under the sun, at the expense of sleep and your sanity."

Says Stanford on this subject,

"The students who thrive at Stanford are those who are genuinely excited about learning, not necessarily those who take every single AP or IB, Honors or Accelerated class just because it has that designation."

In essence, colleges by no means want to promote unhealthy obsession over racking up AP courses, especially if you're not interested in the material.

However, if you can ace the most advanced course load available to you and build a strong application, you're at the level that the best colleges are looking for.

What This 4.0 GPA Guide Is All About

As I mentioned at the beginning, this is not a guide in which I teach you actual math or writing content. This is a high-level strategy and planning guide meant to give you the right mindset and practices for achieving academic success.

I see this as the foundation on which you build your high school career. Just like in construction, if you have a weak foundation, your building will crumble, no matter how much effort you put into it. Build on a strong foundation, and you'll find studying far easier and more effective.

I've worked with a lot of students who see academic success purely as a content-mastery-and-brute-force problem—try hard enough to master the content and put in enough hours, and you'll do better. Unfortunately, if they're learning the wrong way or spending time on stuff that's not actually effective, they'll see quickly that their hard work is being wasted.

Here's what we'll cover in broad strokes. Each layer builds on the next and we'll go from high to low level:

Section 1: Mindset and Psychology

Section 2: overall planning and habits.

• Section 3: Individual Class Strategies

Section 4: Subject-by-Subject Strategies

Bonus section: 4 pieces of miscellaneous advice.

The most fundamental thing you need to control is your own psychology. You need to believe that you're capable of improving, and you need to be motivated to work hard. If you lack these two insights, you won't be able to put in the effort to achieve your goals, and you'll be crippled by small setbacks.

Let's look at exactly what you must do to get yourself in the right mindset.

#1: Have a Growth Mindset—Your Goal Is to Improve Constantly

Pop quiz. Tell me if you agree with any of these statements:

• You have a certain amount of intelligence, and you can't really do much to change it.
• You're naturally good at some things and not others, and what you're not good at you can't do much to improve.
• You're afraid of others knowing about your failures because of what your failures say about you.
• You want to hide your flaws so that you're not judged a failure. You're afraid of looking dumb.
• You often get angry when you get negative feedback about your performance.

If you strongly agree with even one of these statements, you have a critical problem with your psychology. You'll find it very hard to improve from your current situation because, deep down, you basically believe that you can't improve what you were born with. Every setback will pound you down, and you'll find it hard to make progress.

You're not alone. A lot of people, students and adults alike, believe intelligence is fixed: "People are just born smarter than others, and however smart you are now is how smart you'll be from here on out."

This is tempting to believe because your observations of the world seem to fit this idea. The smart kid at your school just always seems to ace everything without breaking a sweat, and she's always been that way. In contrast, you might have tried really hard in a class but ended up with a B. Or you might never have been good at math, so improving your math grades seems impossible.

A belief in a fixed intelligence has problems whether you believe you're smart or not. If you don't believe you're intelligent, then you've accepted that you'll never be intelligent. If you're bad at writing, you'll always just be bad at writing. People are "right-brained" or "left-brained," so of course they'll do worse in classes they're not good at!

While people definitely can have different talents, too often this kind of thinking is used to justify poor performance without thinking hard enough about how to actually improve.

Here's the trap—let's say you do poorly on something, like a math test. If you believe your talent is fixed, your excuse will be that you're bad and you'll always be bad. You won't seriously consider the fact that you can actually improve. You won't think hard about how you failed and what you need to change in order to stop failing.

(I'm using "fail" often here and it might sound intense to you. The way I think about it, if you want an A, then a B is a failure. You can't compromise this because you risk sliding into complacency and lowering your goals. So I'll continue using "fail" throughout this guide even though it usually means something far less severe than literally failing a class.)

This trap is easy to fall into because it's easier to blame something out of your control (an idea that you were born with, talent or not) than to admit that you just didn't work hard or effectively enough to meet your goal.

This isn't just relevant for low-performing students—it's a problem for high performers, too. High-achieving students often fall into a trap wherein they take failures too hard as a personal blow to their egos. They've been praised as smart from childhood and academics comes naturally to them. When they first encounter failure, they don't know how to react.

If you believe that classwork is about intelligence, and you believe your intelligence is high but fixed, then a failure in classwork will seem unsolvable. Every mistake and failed test will be a crushing blow to your ego, and you'll doubt yourself constantly and wonder if you're doing things right. I think this is partly why students who excel in high school end up floundering in college where classes are a lot more demanding and they don't have the structure of high school and parenting.

The Solution to a Fixed Mindset

The antidote to both problems is to adopt a growth mindset. This idea was developed by Carol Dweck, a psychology professor at Stanford, after decades of studying learners. Here's what she says :

"In a fixed mindset students believe their basic abilities, their intelligence, their talents, are just fixed traits. They have a certain amount and that's that, and then their goal becomes to look smart all the time and never look dumb. In a growth mindset students understand that their talents and abilities can be developed through effort, good teaching and persistence. They don't necessarily think everyone's the same or anyone can be Einstein, but they believe everyone can get smarter if they work at it."

In short, intelligence can be developed and trained. You can get better and smarter.

No matter how good you think you are now, your job is to get better and improve constantly. Your job is to use your experiences and failures to do better next time—not to accept your failures for what they are.

This idea comes from research. In a 2007 study , Dweck followed students transitioning from elementary school to junior high, when the material gets more challenging and the grading stricter. They wanted to see how the students' mindsets (fixed or growth) affected their math grades.

At the beginning of the project, students were surveyed to gauge their perspectives on learning and mindset. One question asked whether they agreed or disagreed with the idea that your intelligence is something very basic about you that you can't really change (just like I asked you at the beginning of this section).

Students with a growth mindset felt that hard work led to improvement. In response to a bad grade, growth-mindset students wanted to work harder or try different strategies.

In contrast, students with a fixed mindset believed that smart people didn't need to work hard to do well. When confronted with bad grades, students with fixed mindsets said they would study less in the future and attributed it to their own lack of ability.

At the start of junior high, students in both groups showed comparable math test scores. But as the math got harder, a gap appeared— students with a growth mindset showed growth in test scores, while those with a fixed mindset slumped.

Here's a model of how students with strong growth mindsets compare with those with strong fixed mindsets over a span of two years:

Imagine how this difference scales over 20 years of your life, from elementary school to college and eventually your career. The difference in the final result can be astounding.

This is why there's a recent movement for parents and teachers to stop calling kids smart . Adults think they're encouraging children with praise, but really they're promoting a fixed mindset. If you believe your success is due to intelligence and not hard work, then when you encounter failure, you'll blame your intelligence and not your lack of hard work.

Having a growth mindset is important because you will inevitably face challenges in your classwork. You will do much worse on a biology test than you expected. You'll get an essay back with a lot of red marks saying you just didn't get it.

It'll feel terrible. I'd know—despite my perfect grades, I was nowhere close to acing every single assignment and test.

But after you give yourself time to grieve, you need to analyze exactly what you did and figure out what went wrong. Your actions led to this subpar result, and you need to change your actions to improve your result.

This all starts with believing that you're capable of getting better. If you don't accept this, you'll just throw up your hands and resign yourself to your fate, which is basically like treating every class like a lottery. (Below, I'll talk more about how to use feedback to reflect on your study strategy and improve.)

The idea of a growth mindset is important throughout all of life, really. Whether you're learning how to ski or trying to build stronger friendships, the belief that you're capable of improving gives you the fuel to analyze your shortcomings objectively and actually try to improve them.

The alternative is to accept that you are now as good as you will ever be, and that whatever level you're at is how you'll stay for the rest of your life. That sounds pretty lame to me.

What Can You Do to Adopt a Growth Mindset?

If you said yes to any points in the pop quiz above, you're more likely to be operating in a fixed mindset. It's not likely you'll change this immediately since you've believed in a fixed mindset for many years.

Instead, you'll benefit from a mindset change and taking little steps in the right direction.

First, repeat after me:

• However good you are now, you can get better if you work hard and use your time effectively.
• Failures give you valuable feedback on how to improve. Failures are just temporary setbacks, and you'll do better in the future.
• You can learn to be good at anything because your abilities are almost entirely up to you.

Note that this isn't saying everyone can be an Albert Einstein or a Kobe Bryant. But you can get a lot closer than you think.

After you adopt a mindset change, the important steps are to apply the concepts to your work and continue believing in them. We'll spend a lot more time below explaining how to use feedback to improve your studying.

If you'd like to read more about the growth mindset, check out this article by Dweck or her book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success .

For some fun examples, here's a video of someone who learns to dance over a year with focused practice:

If a year seems like a lot of time, here's a video of a dude who learns to kickflip in a little more than five hours:

The same thing applies to coursework.

If you don't think you're naturally good at math, you can get better.

If you've never been a natural writer, you can learn to write effectively.

I'm dwelling on this point because it's so critical to breaking free from constraints that you place on yourself now. You can improve from where you are, and you can have a lifetime of growth.

#2: Be Prepared to Work Hard

We've already covered how top colleges consider coursework one of the most important pieces of college applications. These schools expect you to take a challenging course load with some of the hardest courses offered at your school (often AP or IB classes). You'll also have to do this while balancing extracurriculars, test prep, a social life, and your own sanity.

This means that your course load is going to be challenging, and your schedule will be demanding. It will take a serious amount of work to excel in every single class, and sometimes it will feel like you're just putting out new fires as fast as you can.

I probably spent at least an average of four hours a day on homework (including weekends) on projects and studying. This would increase dramatically when finals and AP exams came around.

There's no way around this. The smartest kid at your school might seem to just breeze through life and get straight As without breaking a sweat. (If she enjoys having this reputation, she might even actively foster it.)

The reality, however, is likely that this "perfect student" is busting her ass every day. She might just hide it well or doesn't really treat it like work, and so doesn't seem to be breaking a sweat. If you really enjoy learning, then working hard on schoolwork won't be nearly as painful.

If you're used to a comfortable life and schedule with many hours of free time every day, you'll probably have to start making tradeoffs in other areas of your life. If you care about highly competitive college admissions, you will need to orient your life toward that.

This usually means less personal relaxation or social time and cutting out an extracurricular that isn't adding to your application . (Again, I'm not saying you have to do this. Not every student should aim for top colleges and the most rigorous course load possible. But it's a meaningful goal and one that's important to a lot of you, so I'm just being real about what it takes.)

High school is of course four years, and so it's going to be a marathon.

It will take effective strategies to understand where to spend your limited time to get the maximum result.

It will take discipline to keep yourself focused when there are distractions everywhere.

It will take motivation to power through disappointments and setbacks.

But the rewards are worth it, and if you learn these skills, you'll be stronger in the rest of your life. We're going to talk about each of these aspects below.

#3: Find Something Deep to Drive You

For pretty much all ambitious students, high school coursework is going to be a grind. I'm not saying that learning isn't fun, but inevitably you'll have to do assignments you don't care about, sit in class listening to profoundly dull teachers, and prepare for exams that aren't fun. All of this is going to take time and mental energy to drive through the most painful parts.

Having motivation makes a big difference in how hard you work and how strongly you persist through difficulty.

It turns out that there are actually two types of motivation: extrinsic motivation (coming from outside) and intrinsic motivation (coming from within). One of them is a lot more durable than the other.

A common source of extrinsic motivation is parental pressure. If you fail a test, you're grounded. If you don't clean up your room, you have your phone taken away. More positively, if you get an A, maybe your parents buy you that pair of shoes you always wanted.

This can definitely work— but only in the short term and not reliably. While you might do your homework and stop texting for a night, ultimately it leads to frustration and resentment and won't be reliable for long periods of time.

Just remember the last time you argued with your parents about something they wanted you to do, like chores or homework. Fear of punishment can be an effective motivator, but it wears off, especially as you get older and more independent.

"Fine! Ground me, I don't care!" Sound familiar? If you rely on your parents to keep you motivated and your parents aren't around, you won't work.

In contrast, intrinsic motivation comes from within. It's something you want for yourself—screw what other people think.

You might have a dream college you want to attend.

You might want to prove your haters and doubters wrong.

You might want to compete with your nemesis and come out on top.

You might love learning things just because.

In the darkest of times, this motivation will drive you forward. When you're tired and would rather watch YouTube, the idea of getting a B will get you out of bed and keep you focused. When you get a C on your essay, the idea of failure will be unacceptable and you'll have no choice but to question where you fell short and how you can improve in the future.

Research shows that extrinsic motivation, such as rewards, are weak reinforcers in the short run and negative reinforcers in the long run .

Dig deep, find something internal you care about, and keep adding fuel to that fire.

I want to caution here that you should try to steer away from unhealthy motivations if possible. I was very competitive in high school to the point of being repugnant, and my high school atmosphere overall was pretty toxic. It's better if you can find something positive to encourage you that doesn't make you a jerk.

There's more on intrinsic vs extrinsic motivation here , written for teachers.

Up to this point, we've covered really high-level mindset and psychology. I know parts of this sound like hokey motivational speech, but trust me: way more students suffer from these problems than I would like.

Even though schools rarely cover these topics, I think they're the most critical of all. If you don't believe you have the capacity to improve, each failure will cripple you mentally. If you have nothing to drive you, your work every day will be painful. You need a super solid foundation on which to build your actual learning and study habits.

With this in mind, we'll talk about about the next level: good academic practices and habits.

In order to get a 4.0 GPA, you need more than just the right mindset— you need to cultivate effective study habits. This section goes over how to plan out your study schedule so that you're on track to getting a 4.0.

#1: Plan Out Your Specific Course Sequence Early

Let's start with the basics. You need to know early on what classes you're going to take your four years in high school. This will help prepare you mentally for what's to come. Once you make sure you have all the requirements in place, you'll be able to start gathering info on classes to come—and also be able to picture the story you're building for your college applications.

You can approach your course sequence in two ways:

• The first way is top down. How many AP classes do you want to have taken by the time you apply to college? Which ones? With this in mind, you can fill in the classes backward based on the requirements for each one.
• The other way is bottom up. What classes have you taken already? What's the logical, ambitious progression from this point forward? This will take you from now into senior year.

Gear your expected course sequence toward your interests. You don't have to take every single hard class available. Remember what Harvard's admissions office says: "[S]tudents should pursue the most demanding college-preparatory program available, consistent with each student's readiness for particular fields of study" (bold emphasis mine).

Roughly speaking, you tend to fit into one of the following categories:

• Math/science
• Social sciences

This is useful for colleges to understand what you lean toward. I was a science guy and made sure to take all the major AP sciences as well as Calc BC and Stats. I still took AP English, History, and Spanish, but I didn't take AP courses for economics, psychology, and others.

If you don't know what you're interested in, you can do a general spread of the usual courses. As I suggest in my guide to getting into Harvard , I recommend thinking about what you want your application story to be and deeply exploring specific interests rather than trying to be too well rounded. (Sorry to keep linking to my Harvard guide, but it contains my best admissions advice and resonates strongly with this guide!)

This also means that you don't have to play the same game as everyone else. You do not need to take exactly as many AP courses as the top student in your school does.

Are you a writer who really wants to showcase this talent in your college application? You don't have to take AP Biology. It might be really difficult and unenjoyable for you, and it will take up hundreds of hours that are far better spent elsewhere that will strengthen your application.

For my business, I interview and hire a lot of Ivy League graduates. When I ask about AP scores, it's actually rare for someone to have taken the full gamut of AP courses, or even close to the 14 AP tests that I took. Most often it's centered around their core interests.

Don't feel pressured to do what your friends are doing or what's generally accepted as right.

Finally, make sure you really understand all the prerequisites for each of the advanced courses and plan ahead. You might have to take summer-school courses—understand how this works and anticipate any issues.

A personal example: I wanted to take AP Biology my freshman year, which meant I had to take biology as a summer course after 8th grade. This was unusual and I was only one of two freshmen to do this.

The next year I wanted to take AP Chemistry as a sophomore, which required me to take chemistry in the summer. My high school only had two available classes for chemistry, and they prioritized older students. I didn't get the placement, which meant I had to register at a high school half an hour away and drive back and forth each day (thanks, Dad).

#2: Start Getting Early Info on Future Courses

Another benefit of planning early is that you can start gathering information on courses you'll be taking in future years. This will prepare you mentally for what's to come and let you structure your life accordingly, like having the right amount of extracurriculars so you can stay afloat.

Different schools have different reputations for how courses are run. At my school, AP Biology was seen as a hazing boot camp, requiring hardcore memorization of tiny details. In contrast, AP Physics was really laid-back, even though conceptually I think it's a lot more difficult.

This might be the opposite at other schools. Being able to predict this will help you prepare your life in advance and make sure you know what you're getting into.

Also, different teachers have different reputations. One AP Biology teacher at my school was known for being excellent—he explained concepts clearly, was enthusiastic, and showed students the bigger picture. The other teacher was unanimously considered one of the worst teachers at our school. I had the latter (fun story on this later).

Even though you might not have control over which teacher you get, you'll be able to gauge how much variation there will be in your future.

How do you start doing this?

• Get to know upperclassmen and talk to them about their experiences with classes. Everyone loves griping about school. If you have older siblings, ask them and their friends, or join a club through which you can meet upperclassmen.
• Talk to teachers in advance. Ask honest questions about how to prepare for their classes, what the weekly workload will look like, and how intense students feel the class is. Most teachers will actually appreciate this, as long as you don't keep neurotically bugging them about it.

If you set your expectations correctly for the future, you'll be prepared to weather the storm.

#3: Be Ruthlessly Efficient With Your Time

This is probably my most important piece of advice in this section.

There is one limitation in every human's life, from Bill Gates' and Mark Zuckerberg's to yours and mine. It's the time you have per day. Everyone has only 24 hours in a day, and it's up to you to get the most out of each day.

If you're aiming for a top college, building a strong application will likely take up almost all your free time. Roughly speaking, out of 24 hours in a weekday, you have eight hours for school and transit (which are mandatory), eight hours for life outside of school, and eight hours for sleep. (And I do recommend you get sleep—more on that later.)

Of the eight hours you have outside of school, you might need four hours every day to get through your homework and another two for your extracurriculars. This gives you just two hours of free time. Weekends remove the eight hours of schooling but likely replace it with more studying, test prep, and extracurriculars.

When charted like this, it's clear that you have a strictly limited amount of time every day to get through what you need to get through.

Therefore, every hour you can spend or use more efficiently is a huge gain.

Furthermore, if you're able to save an hour every day, you'll be able to get an extra 365 hours per year. This is a massive amount of time you can use to improve your grades or make serious progress on an extracurricular.

The most driven applicants you're competing with will be focused and productive 80% or above all the time. They'll be strongly motivated to do well and often passionate about what they're doing. (Remember what we discussed regarding intrinsic motivation.)

If you're productive at only half this—or 40% of the time—you'll lose out on 3,500 hours of productivity over three years of high school. This is a staggering amount.

We'll talk more about time management below, but there are two high-level points I'd like to make now.

Time Spent on Any Activity Usually Has "Diminishing Marginal Returns"

This means that for each unit of time you put in, the extra value you generate shrinks rapidly.

This is an economics concept that applies to a lot of everyday life.

Notice how at the very beginning, a little bit of effort makes a big impact on results. After a while, each additional unit of effort barely moves the needle on output. Thus "diminishing marginal returns."

A common time drain is social time or hanging out. If you haven't seen your friends all day, then the first 10 minutes you see them are going to be super exciting. You'll share the latest news and gossip and find out more about each other's lives.

By the end of the first hour, though, you'll often run out of things to talk about. This is where awkward silences might start settling in and people start focusing on their phones.

By the end of the third hour, you're probably in a zombie-like state in which you're hanging out but not really doing anything in particular. You could have packed things up two and a half hours ago and spent the rest of that time doing something more effective.

The same goes for texting, Snapchat, Netflix, and browsing the internet, as far as your happiness is concerned. The first little bit goes a long way, but the rest of the time doesn't add all that much.

The trap here is that all these activities are pretty pleasant and pain-free compared to running a marathon or studying. Like a warm blanket in winter, they're easy to get lost in and hard to escape from. It takes real discipline and willpower to break out of that trap and do hard things like study for a test.

Surprisingly, diminishing returns applies equally to classwork. There really is a point at which studying more isn't going to raise your score and you're just obsessing for no real reason. There's a point at which spending more time polishing an essay isn't going to get you a higher grade on it.

If you're a perfectionist like I was, you might obsess over every last detail. You have to recognize when good enough is good enough, and extra units of time aren't actually adding to the quality of your work.

Surprisingly, a 4.0 isn't about perfection in every single aspect of coursework. This is really stressful and difficult. It's about doing a good enough job everywhere and getting the most for the least.

Find Opportunities for Wasted Time and Spent It on More Useful Things

With the concept of diminishing returns above in mind, you should examine where you're spending your time and question the value you get out of every extra half hour you spend on it. This really extends to all aspects of your life.

Largely speaking, your life will be include school, homework, extracurriculars, test prep, social time, and family time. Some of these will be really important to your college application, while others won't be.

If a major goal of your high school life is to get into the best college you can, then you need to structure your life around maximizing your chance of success.

There are a couple of common time sinks that don't end up contributing to your college application as much as you think they do.

Time Sink #1: Time-consuming, ineffective extracurriculars. Typically, extracurriculars will take up the most time outside of coursework. Certain activities take up a ton of time but aren't very impressive to the top colleges if you're not performing at an elite level. I'd like to single out a few common ones:

• Playing an instrument and in an orchestra/marching band: A serious musician might practice one to two hours a day. Being in a marching band might add an hour per day on average. Over three years, this will add up to thousands of hours. If you are not a section leader of a well-known group or a national-level performer, this experience does not add significantly to your application. Sorry to be blunt. Imagine the many thousands of orchestras and marching bands in the country, all with concertmasters, drum majors, and section first chairs. If you are rank and file, you will not stand out, but you will spend a lot of time on not standing out.
• Volunteering: Some students think that 1,000 hours of volunteering service is a lot more impressive than 200 hours. It's not—especially if you're doing something straightforward like delivering hospital samples or serving front line at a soup kitchen. You can get "credit" for volunteering with just, say, an hour per week. Again, hundreds of thousands of students volunteer across the country—it's just not that special unless you make it special .
• Athletics: Sports practices and games are grueling and can take up to two hours on average per day. Plus, when you get home at the end of the day, you might be too tired to maintain your willpower and do your schoolwork efficiently. If you're not good enough to be recruited for your sport or earn meaningful distinctions at the state level or above, it's really not that impressive. Once again, imagine how many hundreds of thousands of varsity athletes there are across the country, and imagine how you fit into this crowd.

As you can see, the pattern is that it's easy to spend time on activities that are very common, very time-consuming, and very indistinguishable from what everyone else is doing.

Time Sink #2: Hard classes you don't need to take. As I mentioned above, you really don't need to take AP Biology if it's especially hard for you. It's easy to get caught up in what everyone else is doing, but you don't have to play the same game. If you drop AP Biology, you might be able to take two AP courses in other subjects you like more.

If you're participating in one of these activities, dropping it can free up hundreds of hours a year. This is a massive amount of time.

Here's what you can do with this bulk of free time:

• Get your grades up: If you historically find yourself short on time to do homework and test prep of the highest quality, you'll be able to devote more time to doing a better job in school.
• Pursue a deep interest and make notable achievements: This is more impressive to college admissions committees than typical activities and will benefit you personally as you explore developing passions.
• Spend that time doing things that truly make you happier: If you're really stressed out all the time, chances are you're spending time on something that's not making you happy or adding much to your college application. Dropping it will be a breath of fresh air.

A clear exception to the rule above is if you really enjoy your activity. If you really really like volleyball but only play at junior-varsity level, then keep on doing it. Happiness is important, and it's usually better to be happy and un-optimized than miserable and optimized.

In all other cases, it's just silly to do one of these activities at a mediocre level at the expense of schoolwork or other helpful things.

I know this analysis sounds pretty intense, but it's super important, and not enough students actually take a step back and evaluate why they're doing what they're doing.

It's also a really good life skill—you're never going to have more time in the day, and when you get into college and your career, getting the most out of each hour will put you ahead of most people.

So that you're not worried about becoming a robot, I admit that I'm nowhere near perfect 100% efficiency throughout my day. In high school, I spent time every day chatting online with friends and playing computer games. These were my ways of unwinding.

However, I rarely ever let this "wasted" time expand beyond an hour per day, often because I gave it to myself as a reward after finishing all my homework. (Remember diminishing marginal returns.) My parents also were pretty effective moderators of this, sometimes disconnecting our internet at night so I wouldn't stay up til 2 am chatting about stupid stuff.

Again, the most important piece of advice I have in this section is to analyze everything you're doing and decide whether it's worth it. If you spend your time correctly, like what I suggest in my guide on getting into Harvard , this will put you far ahead of most of your classmates.

#4: Know When Every Assignment Is Due and Plan, Plan, Plan

For a sane life, you need to know precisely when major tests and papers are due, and when every homework assignment is due.

You then need to plan ahead and budget enough time for each assignment. You need to notice when you're ahead or behind in your schedule for each of your classes and adjust your time so you can catch up.

This is essentially like having five parallel pipelines going on at any one time:

A Gantt chart , a common project management technique. More hardcore than you need, but used here for illustration.

If you know you need a full week to write a good essay, plan for this. Start a full week ahead of when it's due, and not any later.

If you know you need 15 hours to study for an AP Biology test, budget the time for that every day.

I suggest using Google Calendar or the iCloud Calendar for this. You can color code categories of work like homework, projects, and tests. You can also set alerts for things you tend to forget.

You want to be a machine and aim for full preparation for everything you're responsible for.

You should treat any surprises or last-minute work as a failure of planning. These increase your stress and lower the quality of your work. No last-minute homework crunch of quiz studying should be happening.

I know that all-nighters are, in rare cases, necessary, but they should not be a common occurrence. While it might be fun to bond with friends over pulling an all-nighter for a paper, take a step back and realize what that says: "I didn't plan well enough to budget enough time for this assignment, even though I've already done 20 of them. It was physically and mentally painful, and most likely lowered the quality of my work."

The better thing to do is to have that paper ready a whole day before it's due and have it so rock solid that you're sure it's going to get you an A.

Here are a few effective scheduling tips:

• Do a regular weekly and monthly review of your schedule to plan ahead: Get your parents involved since they can help enforce your planned schedule and deadlines.
• Prioritize your work correctly: Assignments that take up a bigger portion of a class's grade are more important. Classes that you're doing worse in need more critical attention. You should be dynamic and adjust to the circumstances. Do not just focus your attention on assignments you like more or that are easier for you.
• Know when to cut your losses for now and move on: It's easy to get stuck in a rut and spin your wheels without making progress. Move onto something else for now and come back to the assignment later. When you come back, you'll likely have a new perspective and get unstuck.

Again, since you're going to be spending at least 100 hours per month on homework, you might as well spend an hour a month guiding where that time will be spent.

#5: Don't Prioritize Other Things Over Sleep

Now, sleep. There seems to be an epidemic of high school students regularly sleeping very late at night—say, past midnight—and having to wake up at 7 am or earlier. They then need to get triple shot espressos every few hours to make it through the day.

This sounds crazy to me.

It's universally accepted that teens should be getting eight to 10 hours of sleep every night . When I was in high school, I regularly slept from 11 pm to 7 am, without fail.

I remember this clearly because in senior year, I had to stay up till 2 am working on a group English project that we'd all procrastinated on. This stood out to me because I'd rarely ever stayed up that late.

And yet, with eight hours of sleep every day, I was still able to pack everything in. (Remember what I said above about being ruthless with effectively using your time.)

Sleep has a huge impact on your performance and happiness.

Worse, it affects you in an insidious way—you'll think more slowly and less creatively. Essentially, a vicious cycle happens: you fall asleep later, making you less efficient and making your homework take longer to do.

If you're not getting enough sleep, you need to examine where you're spending your time and be sure that every hour you're spending on something is really worth it. I would bet something does exist that you can cut out.

There's probably some combination of an intense coursework schedule, a demanding school, and intense extracurriculars that make it extra hard to carve out more time. But I'm sure at least one of two things is happening:

• There's a lot of time spent on an activity that isn't actually worthwhile for college admissions or
• There's ample time being wasted somewhere else (we covered both above)

I can also guess that something dumb is happening: sleeping late is now considered a badge of honor, especially at uber-competitive high schools. If you're around hardworking students, people likely brag often about getting only four hours of sleep. Pounding Red Bulls visibly is something to be proud of. They might even be tempted to share this on Instagram, timed perfectly at 3 am.

This is silly because it incentivizes the opposite of what you want—it rewards you for being inefficient, not efficient. In fact, people who do this probably waste time during the afternoon because they want to sleep late. Sounds crazy, doesn't it?

You should aim for the opposite—do really well and make it look easy. (If people don't actually do this, I apologize as I'm an old man now and out of touch with you teens.)

Here are tips to get more sleep:

• Enforce a sleep deadline every day , like 11 pm, so that you can get up by 7 am to get ready for school. Force yourself to lie in bed, not grab your phone and burrow under the covers. If you have to break this deadline, make sure you have a good reason for doing so.
• Cut caffeine six hours before your scheduled bedtime. After that point, drinking caffeine can have serious effects on the quality of your sleep . I see people in Starbucks at 9 pm and have no idea how they sleep at night. If you need caffeine to stay awake from 5 pm to 11 pm, you're probably not getting enough sleep at night!
• Cut the use of electronic screens on phones, tablets, and monitors before sleep. Blue light from screens disrupts your circadian rhythm by tricking your body into thinking it's daylight when it's not. You can also install software that changes the color of your screen to a warmer color. Flux is great for desktops and laptops, and Twilight for Android. iPhones offer a free Night Shift mode you can access through the Settings app.
• If you have a habit of wasting too much time before bed (like me), then strictly enforce your deadline again.

Up to this point, we've discussed high-level strategy. This sounds like general life advice, which is appropriate given that since you're a student, school is a major part of your life.

If you want to get a 4.0 GPA, you'll need to master your life habits and psychology.

I can't repeat enough that you need a solid foundation on top of which to build your studying and classwork. If you don't have this, you'll end up like those unfortunate students who take on heavy course loads and flounder for years, getting five hours of sleep a night, feeling miserable, and not making it into their target schools.

This is a recipe for academic discontent and disillusionment. It's like trying to build a house on quicksand.

Instead, you want to build a fortress on bedrock. After reading this guide, take the time to review all the important notes and reflect on whether you feel like you're executing them well. You might even do this every semester to make sure you're on track to your 4.0.

Section 3: General Class Strategy

With the high-level stuff covered, we'll now get into the thick of it: how to get straight As in your actual classes. This section will cover general class strategies that apply to every single class you take, regardless of subject. Section 4 will then cover strategies for individual subjects like math and English.

#1: Understand How the Class Is Graded

At the beginning of the year, every teacher makes clear how the class will be graded. This varies tremendously from subject to subject and teacher to teacher, and it's important to understand where you should be spending your time to get the best results.

There are two important pieces to this:

How Are Different Components of Your Work Weighted in Your Final Grade?

Commonly, this means a distribution across homework and projects, test scores, and participation. Different teachers have different weightings. Often, science and math classes focus on tests, while English classes focus on essays and projects.

You need to prepare a strategy for each course to do well on whatever is maximized. A simple rule of thumb is that you should spend a proportional amount of time depending on how much it contributes to your grade.

If a class is 50% tests, 40% homework, and 10% participation, you should split your time for that class accordingly. In this case, you could get away with minimal class participation as long as you ace the tests and homework.

Sometimes this can be deceiving—some teachers might give little weight to homework and more to tests, for example (this is almost always the case in college courses).

But it's often difficult to do well on tests without the regular commitment to homework, so you should spend that time on homework even if it doesn't contribute to your grade.

What's the Grading Scale—Is It Curved? Or Is It Based on an Absolute Scale on Test Scores?

Curved scales are rare in high schools, likely because they lead to unwanted competition. But if your class is curved, you need to pay attention to where you're positioned in the class, rank-wise, and you need to give yourself extra wiggle room in case the curve on a test is particularly tough.

If, instead, the class is graded on an absolute scale, like 93%+ is an A and the tests aren't curved, you can focus more on your own performance. This also makes planning more predictable—if you're at an 87% and need to pull yourself up to a 93%, you can figure out what your remaining homework and test scores have to be to get an A.

#2: Learn How to Learn

Learning is a mysterious process. You probably don't remember how you learned to walk or talk. When you memorize something, you can recall that fact some time later, even though you don't really know what is actually happening in your brain.

Even at the frontier of research, the nature of how we learn is still pretty mysterious.

Regardless, there are still a couple of principles of learning that have been provably effective.

Imagine Your Knowledge as a Tree

To build a tree, first you need strong roots and a trunk—these are the foundational concepts of the subject. Then, you build the branches and the leaves—these are the smaller details you're often tested on.

If you don't have a trunk, you won't have anything for your branches to grow on. So when you learn something, really focus on the fundamental core of what you're learning—the core that underlies all the little details. (I got this analogy from Elon Musk , the well-known entrepreneur behind SpaceX and Tesla Motors.)

For an example from calculus, let's take the concept of derivatives. On a test, you'll often get a function and be asked to find the derivative of it. Different functions behave in different ways; the derivative of 2 x 2 is 4 x , but the derivative of sin( x ) is cos( x ). These often require memorization, and the details are the leaves of the tree.

The trunk of the tree is the fundamental idea behind what a derivative is: when you take a derivative of a function, what you're doing is defining the rate of change along the function. At any particular point, the rate of change is equal to the slope of the line tangent to the function at that point.

Derivatives, one of the most important concepts of calculus. If you're nowhere near taking calculus, don't worry about the details just yet.

When you understand this trunk, then every derivative formula afterward makes intuitive sense. You'll be able to absorb new formulas —new branches and leaves—much more easily since you just add them to the trunk.

But if you don't understand this trunk, you'll find yourself struggling to memorize the details piecemeal, as if you're making a shoddy quilt.

This is also true in the humanities. When you learn how to write an essay in English or history, look beyond just following the standard essay template given by your teacher. Here's what you need to understand:

• The thesis-evidence-conclusion structure is an effective way to make an argument because you prepare the reader for what you're going to say, prove it using evidence, and then recap the important takeaway points.
• When you cite textual evidence from a book, you need to relate it back to your thesis to make clear how the evidence supports or proves your point.
• Transitions between paragraphs and within paragraphs help the reader piece together all your disparate points into a cohesive whole.

Once you build this trunk, the details of how to do this with actual words and phrases will come naturally. If you don't build your trunk, you'll become frustrated with following someone else's instructions without knowing why.

When you learn something, really try to ask yourself what the root of what you're learning is. Once you identify this, the details will come more naturally to you. Many teachers don't teach this way, so it's up to you to do it yourself.

Constantly Relate New Things You're Learning to Things You Already Know

When I visualize how knowledge works, I imagine a network of nodes connected to each other. Each node is a unit of information—a math formula, a concept, or a historical fact.

When two nodes are connected, I see them as related to each other. Two linked nodes might be the area of a circle and the perimeter of a circle, for example.

How I visualize my knowledge: each circle is a concept or fact, and lines connect related concepts.

Some nodes are heavily connected to each other. Some nodes hang on only by a thread.

Nodes that are weakly linked and not accessed often tend to be forgotten much more quickly. Intuitively, this makes sense: if a particular concept is related to other concepts, every time you recall one of the related concepts, you'll have a better chance of activating the related concepts. This then cements all the concepts around.

I know this is very abstract, so let's use an example. In US History, you'll learn about three core events: the Revolutionary War, the Civil War and slavery abolishment, and women's suffrage.

The brute-force way to learn about these events is to memorize the facts and details for each event, as though each were in its own independent vacuum. After all, you're likely taught and tested unit by unit, so this is the natural way to learn.

But in reality, there are key themes that tie these events together:

• Over time, the subjugated tend to earn their freedom: In the Revolutionary War, American colonists were under the dominion of the British government until they won their independence. In the Civil War, slavery was a contentious issue that eventually led to its abolition and the freedom of slaves. In regard to women's suffrage, women earned the right to vote equally as men. This trend continues to hold true today with gay marriage rights.
• For each event, key leaders spoke for the masses and represented their will: Select examples of these include the founding fathers for the Revolutionary War, Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass for the Civil War, and Susan B. Anthony for women's suffrage.
• For each event, there was opposition that tried to maintain the status quo: This would be the British, the South, and society at large, respectively. (Both men and women opposed women's suffrage.)

I'm not a history buff so apologies for this complete simplification.

These unifying themes help you see the patterns among these important events. When you learn about Abraham Lincoln, you can relate his achievements to those of George Washington, strengthening your understanding of both.

Now, these events are clearly tremendously different from each other, but defining contrasts is just as helpful. During the Revolutionary War and the fight for women's suffrage, the main instigators were those being subjugated—the colonists and women. In contrast, in the Civil War, the action was more strongly led by white men in the Union and less so by the slaves themselves.

Defining these contrasts still develops a connection among the events, in turn leading to a stronger understanding of both. It also helps you ask interesting questions about why these events differed from each other.

You can see how altogether you're building this interconnected network of events. When you learn world history, you'll be able to fit the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the end of colonization, and other events into this framework.

This rich, multi-dimensional network-building is a stark contrast to the usual way history is taught—as a one-dimensional timeline. The one-dimensional way was how I was taught history and it made history a pretty boring collection of historical facts, which is a shame because learning could be so much more interesting and effective.

If you can focus on building a strong trunk of knowledge and connecting what you learn to what you already know, you'll be able to learn much more effectively.

#3: Understand How Teachers Think, and Give Them What They Want

If learning is your job, your teacher is your boss. Your responsibility is to follow the teacher's guidelines and give the teacher what she wants. Your performance will then determine whether you get a promotion (an A) or get fired (an F).

This can be intimidating, but it doesn't have to be. Even though teachers might seem like imposing vanguards of knowledge, in reality they're humans, with ambitions and flaws like everyone else.

By understanding how a teacher thinks, you'll be able to customize your approach to the class to increase your chances of performing well in it. This is especially important in subjective pieces such as essay grading, group projects, and class participation.

There's a huge variation in the types of teachers you'll have. Some teachers are veterans—they've seen it all and won't put up with your whining. Others are new—they're still trying to figure it out, really want to do a good job, and crave approval from students.

Some teachers are passionate, want to connect with students, and achieve carpe diem moments daily. Others are perfunctory and just want kids to keep quiet and cause less trouble in their lives so they can go home and watch The Walking Dead .

Some teachers want lively class discussions and want to see students inspire each other. Others run class like a prison—no outbursts, or you get solitary.

The more you understand how a teacher thinks, the more you can give the teacher what she wants. This might sound sociopathic and calculating, but in reality it's a social skill you already use without thinking much about it. It's also a skill you'll be using throughout your life, from college applications to job applications and work.

Here are some general principles I've found to be true of most teachers.

Most Teachers Do, at Their Core, Care a Lot About Their Job

They chose education as their craft for a reason, usually because they like the idea of inspiring students and contributing to their growth.

They also care about the subject matter—if they teach math, they find math interesting. If they teach history, they find history interesting. Grizzled veteran teachers might be disillusioned by this because maybe their kids have historically sucked, but they're still open to being surprised and inspired by the young people they teach.

What does this suggest?

Most teachers hate students whose sole concern is getting a good grade and who make this desire clear from their questions and behavior.

Most teachers love students who sincerely care about the class material and show curiosity. They love passing on their subject matter knowledge to students, filling the jar of the student's mind.

One place this is clear is in the syllabi that teachers write for classes. You might not know that AP courses at every high school are audited by the College Board for curricular soundness, and teachers are required to submit their syllabi for approval. Here's a real example from a teacher for AP English Language:

This lesson plan is an X-ray into the thinking of the teacher; it clearly describes the meaningful skills students are expected to learn, and the teacher's enthusiasm is palpable. While this is probably an example of an above-average teacher, it illustrates how teachers who care really do understand what they're teaching and what they want students to get out of it.

If you can prove to the teacher you're learning what she wants you to learn, you'll be in amazing shape.

Most Teachers See the Students They Teach as the Future Generation of Society

You are the future, so teachers want to see admirable qualities in their students. You'll be liked if you're honest, take responsibility for your mistakes, contribute positively to the class, and work hard. You'll be disliked if you're sneaky or dishonest, disrupt the classroom, act arrogantly, or blame others for your mistakes.

Be the kind of person teachers would like to entrust the future to.

Most Teachers Already Have a Lot of Work to Do

Teaching requires a huge time commitment. After school ends, teachers have to grade homework at night and plan for the next school day. Some of them supervise extracurriculars. This can mean an effective workday of 7 am to 6 pm.

If you cause more trouble and add to the teacher's load, this will be annoying.

If, instead, you can offer ways to lighten the teacher's load and solve his problems, he'll love you.

Why does all of this actually matter?

Understanding how the teacher thinks is critical to getting good grades on assignments, tests, and participation. On a history test, does the teacher care more about the big picture or about reciting minute historical facts? In an English essay, does the teacher care about executing a standard template well, or about having a novel point of view? What skills and concepts does the teacher really want to see in this essay?

If you approach your classes from the teacher's perspective, you'll be able to customize your work to what the teacher expects. We'll talk more about this later.

Another significant way this will improve your class performance is to communicate with the teacher more reliably. Given the same issue, you can present it in a way that'll make the teacher hate you, or in a different way that'll make the teacher admire your maturity and resolve.

Let's say you didn't do well on a test. An annoying student would say something like this:

"Ms. Robinson, I got a B on this test. I studied really hard and some of the questions were unfair. You didn't tell us they were going to be on the test. Also, I've been really busy with orchestra and volunteering—other students don't have these responsibilities. Is there any way I can get my test regraded? Can I get extra credit?"

Gag. This is nails on a chalkboard for a teacher. You get anti-brownie points. Poop points. I've overheard this often during high school and even in college.

Here's a better way to approach your teacher:

"I got a B on this test, even though I spent a lot of time studying, and I wanted to see if you could help. I'm not here to ask for more points; I just want to improve for the future.

I feel like I have a problem with the way I'm studying. For example, before the test I felt really confident with this kind of question, but on the test I made this mistake and I'm not sure why. Also, I tried to be thorough in my studying, but I missed the sections that were tested in these questions.

Do you have any suggestions?"

Let's contrast the two options. In the first one, you blame the teacher and your schedule, not yourself. You put the focus on the grade rather than the learning. Finally, you try to get an unfair advantage over other students without contributing anything yourself. This type of response is pretty typical because, to be fair, your goals are really important to you and it's tempting to try to get easy points where you can. (Also, you're young and more likely to think the world revolves around you.)

The second option is a 180 on the first. You put the emphasis on improving yourself, not on the grade. You own up to your mistakes rather than blaming other people. Before the meeting, you've done your homework by reflecting on where you might have fallen short rather than expecting the teacher to fix all your problems while you sit back. You also make it an open conversation in which the teacher can use her expertise to ask questions and dig more deeply.

These kinds of interactions make a world of difference in how teachers perceive you. It's unlikely teachers will actually give you an unfair advantage in grading, but it will make your life easier. You'll be treated with more respect and understanding. Teachers will work harder to help you. In cases wherein you need more flexibility, the teacher might be more likely to accommodate you. It'll also ultimately lead to strong letters of recommendation for your college applications .

Now, I'm not talking about sycophantic brown-nosing. You should be sincere and not just act the part. Teachers have seen a lot, and it's easier than you think to detect insincerity. One common way to sniff out a fake is to ask more questions and dig a little more deeply. If you haven't actually analyzed your test, for example, when the teacher asks you how you studied and what you think your mistakes were, you'll come up short. It'll then be clear you're just mouthing words, and the teacher will lose trust in you.

Take some time to think through classes you're struggling in or teachers you don't get along with. Do you understand what the teacher's expectations are? Why aren't you meeting them, and what can you do to improve this?

#4: Develop Strong Study and Homework Habits

Over the course of high school, you'll likely spend more than 3,000 hours on schoolwork and studying.

This is a lot of time. If you can make a 10% improvement on this by spending 20 hours learning really good study strategy, it'll be well worth your time. (This is what's known as "high leverage"—you put in a little to get a lot.)

Here are a few guidelines I think every student should follow.

Study Habit 1: Focus on Effectiveness and Efficiency

When you get into the thick of high school, you start taking a lot of things for granted. Each math homework assignment will take about an hour. Studying for a history test might take eight hours. An essay all included might take 15 hours.

Rather than taking things for granted, you should be continuously evaluating whether you're spending the right amount of time on your work. How long is homework taking? Why?

What is your time distribution across all the activities that go into doing homework? Is anything less effective than you thought it was? Can you experiment with restructuring your time so that you get better results for less time? (This connects to the "being ruthless with your time spent" point above).

As an extreme question, can you cut your total time down by 50% while maintaining the same level of quality? Why or why not? I ask my employees this all the time, and while it's not usually strictly possible, it helps illuminate what things can be cut with little effect on the outcome.

By going through this analysis, you'll be able to partition your time spent into effective and ineffective components. If you can axe the ineffective parts, you'll save a lot of time without affecting the quality of your work.

At the end of this reflection, you might find that there's really nothing better you can do and you just need to keep chugging along. This can be true, but you have to be honest with yourself and give yourself enough time to give this serious consideration. You should also experiment with alternatives or improvements and reflect on whether you've improved or declined.

Remember, there's always a time-quality tradeoff curve. Get the most for the least. Avoid perfectionism. Understand how much you need to do to get a great score, and when each unit of time is no longer returning you sufficient results, spend that time elsewhere.

Study Habit 2: Put Away Your Phone, Turn Off Your Computer, Eliminate Distractions

There's homework time and there's relaxation time. Clearly compartmentalize both. Do not mix the two.

When you're doing homework, do it at 100% effort.

You're nowhere near as good at multitasking as you think you are . Focus on one thing, and then focus on another.

Recently, I went to a coffee shop and watched a college student at the table next to me try to study chemistry while using her phone. It was painful to watch: she'd read a page for two minutes, get a text, respond to it, and then browse Facebook for five minutes. Overall, it took her an hour to get through three pages.

She likely wasn't super motivated to study to begin with (hence why I started this guide with that high-level principle), but the bad study habits guarantee she's wasting her time. Not only was she getting nowhere with her studying, but she also probably wasn't enjoying texting and browsing Facebook all that much either. A lose-lose.

If you really have a problem with this, I suggest timing yourself just to see how much time you're wasting. Get a chess clock and force yourself to time yourself when you're studying and when you're using your phone.

If you need to use the computer while you work, there are browser tools such as RescueTime that track what websites you've visited and for how long. You can see how much time you're spending researching and how much time you're spending just watching YouTube.

You can also block distracting websites for a certain period of time. This way you can ensure that 6-8 pm will stay English-essay work time—not 20% English essay/80% YouTube time.

Study Habit 3: Do Homework in School If Possible

A lot of teachers have spare class time or downtime. Typically students just chat with each other until the bell rings. Use that time to do your homework you would otherwise do at night.

I remember AP Computer Science was an easy class. I'd finish assignments within 10 minutes and then work on homework the rest of the hour. In another history class, the teacher's lectures were unhelpful and I was better off just reading the chapter by myself at home. I took that time to work on other homework. (Note that some teachers get really annoyed when you do this, so be careful.)

There's also lunchtime, which is a little less than an hour. Many students sit at the lunch tables and chat until the bell rings. I banded together with a bunch of other nerd friends in the library and just did homework. Social life + homework = killing two birds with one stone.

Every day, this saved me more than two hours of time. When I got home, I'd only have a few hours of homework and studying left, which freed up room for extracurriculars and a few games of Starcraft. (This is also partly why I was able to go to sleep before 11 pm every night, even with my extracurriculars.)

Now, this isn't the coolest thing to do and you might be afraid of looking like a nerd. But if you think it's a good idea, you generally shouldn't lead your life based on what other people think about you anyway.

Study Habit 4: Learn to Deal With Procrastination

Procrastination affects pretty much everyone in multiple aspects of life. Everyone knows that feeling of how much easier it is to put off studying for a test so that you can get an extra half hour to watch Netflix. Before you know it, though, it's time to sleep and you haven't done anything.

We have an excellent guide on why procrastination happens and how to overcome it , in the context of test prep. I highly recommend reading it.

As a summary, procrastination happens when (1) you feel you're in the wrong mood to finish a task, and (2) you assume your mood will change in the near future. This can lead to a vicious cycle wherein you feel guilty for procrastinating, making it even harder to summon the energy to be productive again.

#5: Learn to Ace Tests by Understanding What's Being Tested and How

Tests typically make up the majority of how you're graded in a class. Teachers need a way to assess your knowledge in a standardized way that's hard to cheat on, and tests are the best way (or the least bad way) to do this. Learning how to prepare for tests and how to get great scores reliably is critical to getting straight As.

The most important piece to this is understanding what's being tested (the "content") and how it'll be tested (the "format"—e.g., multiple choice, essay, open-ended questions, etc.). This will directly determine what you study and how you prepare for the test.

You likely already know this intuitively—how you study for a math test is pretty different from how you study for a Spanish test. For math, you run through a lot of practice problems. For Spanish, you memorize vocab and practice grammar rules.

Once you know what you're being tested on and how, you can build your test-study strategy:

Step 1: Understand the test content and format Step 2: Define your test-prep strategy, integrating reading, practice questions, and review Step 3: Execute your study strategy Step 4: Test yourself Step 5: Improve your method and go back to Step 3

The critical piece here is Step 1: understanding what's actually on the test.

Even within the same subject, different teachers have different styles. You and your friend might be taking the same course—say, AP US History—with different teachers but have entirely different tests. Your teacher might emphasize fact memorization and have mainly multiple-choice questions gridded in through scantrons, whereas your friend's teacher might emphasize big-picture concepts and use tests consisting mainly of essays and free responses. The way you prepare for each test is thus very different.

How do you figure out the best way for you to study? Here are four helpful strategies:

Strategy 1: Ask Your Teacher for a Sample Exam From Last Year

Teachers are usually consistent in how they test from year to year, so chances are this year's tests will look a lot like last year's. In college it's common for professors to give access to previous years' exams as practice tests. Good high school teachers will do this because they don't recycle tests and want to give students fair exposure to what the test will be like.

On the other hand, bad teachers will hide previous years' tests because they are lazy, want to recycle the tests, and don't want to give resourceful students an unfair advantage.

Strategy 2: Get Exams From Last Year's Students

If you have friends or know upperclassmen who took the class with that teacher, ask if they've saved their tests. You can set up an exchange among your friends wherein you share materials from classes that others will take in the future. Lazy teachers really hate this because it forces them to write new exams each year, but that's part of their job.

Note that you should of course be careful and avoid allegations of cheating. If you're worried about this, feel free to ask your teacher how he feels about it before you try to get previous year's tests. And, of course, don't do anything dumb like plagiarizing someone's essay.

Strategy 3: Ask Your Teacher What's Going to Be on the Test and How It'll Be Tested

Don't be annoying about this. Remember what I said about giving teachers what they want. Teachers often hate the question, "Is this going to be on the test?" because they can't win. If they say no, students stop paying attention. If they say yes, students won't appreciate the greater meaning of what they're learning. Most teachers really do care about how their students are learning and get excited when they see students with a genuine love of learning.

A more palatable way of doing this is to be proactive. Prepare a high-level overview of content that you believe is on the test, and the format in which it'll be tested. Go to the teacher and ask her to take a quick look. Make it clear that you're asking because you care about doing well on the test and you want to understand the teacher's expectations.

You might even offer to save the teacher time by circulating this to your classmates so that she won't have to talk to 20 different students about what's on the test. (Remember, if you can make the teacher's life easier, she'll love it.)

If you do this earnestly and not in an obviously groveling way, the teacher will typically be more than happy to help because it's clear you care about your education.

Strategy 4: Use Every Previous Test to Infer What Future Tests Will Look Like

Even if you have zero information about the first test and you go in blind, the second test will likely look a lot like the first one. Halfway through the course, you'll be comfortable with how the teacher thinks and be able to predict the tests with high accuracy.

Story Time: My Least Favorite High School Class

The worst class I've ever taken was AP Biology my freshman year of high school. The teacher was a middle-aged man who was profoundly uninspiring.

Every day he'd turn off the lights, sit in front of the class with an overhead projector, and go line by line through the teacher notes provided by the book ( Campbell's Biology ). He would literally just read each bullet point, add a sentence or two, and move on. He had a monotone voice, and half the students treated this class as nap time (though as I suggest above, the smarter thing would've been to work on other homework during this time). Thinking about his inefficacy as a teacher is infuriating to this day.

The worst part of the class was how the tests were created. They were entirely multiple choice and often tested trivia straight from the book. There wasn't really any high-level thinking involved—the only way to do well on them was to memorize each chapter before the test.

I remember the worst question was a trivial fact from the caption of an image —I think it was the species name of a bird—that was totally irrelevant to what we needed to know for genuine understanding. He'd just decided it was a good way to test whether someone had memorized the chapter.

This struck fear into all of us. After bombing the first test, I had to change my approach. I started reading every chapter six times to memorize all the details. I'd highlight details like a madman to make sure I wasn't missing anything that might be tested. I'd create my own quizzes before reading the chapter so I could assess how well I was memorizing the details.

The key point is that I customized how I prepared to the content and the format of the test. My approach would have been totally inappropriate for another AP Biology class, but it was the right one for this class.

Going into the end of the school year, I had an A and was safe. It took a ton of work but I did it. Unfortunately, the teacher realized that because of how crappy of a job he'd done at teaching, the average grade in his class was going to be a C, and he was probably going to get a lot of hate from parents and the administration. He decided at the end of the year to administer a sample AP test that was entirely extra credit.

I was annoyed because I ended up with something like 130% in the class, which is why you see an A+ in my transcript for freshman-year AP Biology, which meant I'd studied unnecessarily hard.

The upside to this was that the actual AP test was super easy because I had literally memorized the entire textbook.

#6: View Your Job as Constant Improvement and Build Feedback Cycles for Yourself

NOTE: This is one of the most important points in this entire guide. I work with so many students who don't understand this and it's killing their potential to improve.

If something you're trying isn't giving you the results you want after a lot of trials, it's clear that you need to reexamine your strategy. If you're cutting broccoli for dinner and you chop off a piece of your finger every night, it's pretty obvious you need to change how you're using the knife (unless you love adding iron to your family's diet).

For some reason, this isn't as obvious in the context of coursework. If you get a C on a test, you might be tempted to believe that if you use the same study methods but just study twice as hard, you'll raise your grade to an A.

If the cause of your poor performance was truly a lack of time, then this can work. You can use my advice above to carve out more time for studying.

But in many cases, this is wishful thinking. It's as though you need to tunnel through a brick wall, and you're trying to get through by pounding your head against it. You're failing to make a dent, but you believe if you pound three times as hard you'll be able to get through it. There's something wrong with this strategy, and you need to understand why you've failed and how you can improve.

I think the reason this is so difficult in the context of coursework is that students don't understand the root cause of why they've failed. If you get a B on an essay, it seems tempting to think that you just need to spend more time researching and writing your essay, but really your weakness might be that you just don't understand the teacher's standards and are playing a totally different ball game.

This is why I stress the importance of the high-level concepts above. If you understand that academic success is a combination of multiple factors—motivation, time management, effective learning, understanding of class grading, teacher expectations, and the actual content—you'll be able to pinpoint your weaknesses more effectively.

If you don't understand these are important, you'll have no idea where to begin.

You should treat every evaluation as an opportunity for reflection and improvement. Remember the growth mindset we discussed above. Every disappointing homework assignment and test gives you a chance to reflect on how you failed and how you'll avoid these mistakes in the future.

We can call this the iteration cycle:

First, you obtain a measurement. This is often a grade on a homework assignment or test. If it's lower than your standards, something needs to change.

Next, you reflect on what happened. Here's a checklist of questions to ask yourself:

• How was the assignment or test graded? What did the teacher expect?
• What did you produce? What was your method of producing it? Try to break down the major pieces of what you did.
• What is the difference between the expectation and what you produced?
• Why did this discrepancy happen? What flaw in your method most strongly contributed to this failure?
• What are you going to change about your method to prevent it from happening again?
• When is the next time you'll be able to evaluate whether this is an improvement?

This is comprehensive and might sound tedious, but it's critical to improvement. In my experience with test prep, this is often the second-biggest barrier that prevents students from improving their test scores (the first is not putting in enough time, period).

Sometimes this analysis can be quick—you forgot to proofread your essay and your grammar mistakes got you points taken off. Clearly, next time you should dedicate time to spellchecking.

On the other extreme, after a lot of reflection you might not even know where to begin. Then you can ask the teacher for help. (Remember what I said above—if you go to the teacher with clear introspection and questions, this will show you really care about your education.)

Take notes on this reflection, especially on your plan for next time. Write this down as a commitment to yourself. The next time you have a chance for evaluation, such as a test or assignment, review these notes and implement your plan.

In the last stage of the cycle, you get your next measurement. If you improved substantially and met your goal, great work—from here on out, you just need to keep doing what you did. If you didn't improve or receded, treat your next iteration cycle even more seriously since your situation has gotten worse and you'll need to try something new to dig yourself out of the hole.

Do this for every class in every semester throughout high school. After you do it a few times it'll be second nature, and you'll do it without even thinking.

As an analogy, this is how you keep your car on the road when driving your car. You get constant visual feedback on where you are on the road. If you veer to the left, you reflect on this and turn the steering wheel to the right. You do this constantly to stay on the road.

When driving, you run constant iteration cycles to stay on the road.

When people first start learning to drive around age 14-15, they're not very accustomed to this feedback loop. They'll go nearly off the road before jerking the steering wheel back in the other direction. Then, they realize they've gone too far and jerk it too far back.

Practiced drivers make significantly smaller adjustments all the time. The next time your parents drive, watch them. You'll see them constantly make tiny adjustments left and right to stay exactly where they want to on the road. Experienced drivers do this automatically, by habit.

In your academic life, you don't want to drive 60 mph off the road. Use feedback to figure out where you are and what adjustments you need to make if you're off track.

As a side note, here's a video of teens getting distracted by their phones and shooting way off the road:

Complete failure to measure -> reflect -> improve.

I can't repeat this enough: this concept of iteration cycles is vital to your academic success.

Many students don't go through this process because they don't realize they need to or don't feel like it's important enough compared to actual studying.

In contrast, I would say this is the most important thing you should do after a test. Between every test you probably spend 20 hours in school and 20 hours on homework. Don't you think it's worth one hour examining your method and thinking about it if you're not doing well?

Don't drive 60 mph off the road.

We've covered a lot of high-level stuff so far. We've talked about the foundations of motivation and determination. We've discussed figuring out how teachers think and how to understand how you'll be tested. We've also covered good study habits and how to iterate on feedback to improve your results.

Now, let's talk about specific subjects, because how you'll treat calculus is very different from how you'll treat history.

Math and Science Classes

Math and science classes are typically the most straightforward classes because the material is very standardized. If you take AP Chemistry, the tests will most likely look like standard chemistry questions, and the labs will look like standard labs. It's the same with calculus and physics—you have a ton of practice problems to work through in your textbook, online, and in supplementary books. Unlike English-essay grading, teachers can't really get too creative or subjective here.

The good news is that you can typically predict with great accuracy how you're doing well before a test. It's easy to prepare your own practice tests, review your mistakes, and understand where your weaknesses are and how you need to improve.

The hard part about math and science is that the concepts build on each other throughout the year. In short, something you learned earlier will directly affect your ability to grasp future concepts.

In physics, for example, if you don't understand how force diagrams work, you'll struggle every step of the way through mechanics. In chemistry, if you don't understand stoichiometry and how to convert units to each other, every calculation will be difficult for you.

This doesn't apply as strongly in other subjects like history, which tends to be composed more of modular units. Even though I mentioned above that you can connect different concepts to build a strong network of knowledge, at the end of the day they don't build on each other as much. You might have flunked the section on the American Revolution, but this doesn't strongly affect how well you'll do on the Civil War section.

Essentially, what you have is exponential growth of knowledge vs linear growth:

In my experience, math and science teachers don't emphasize this enough. They treat learning linearly, but in math and science it's really exponential. If you don't get it right in the beginning and don't fix it, you're screwed for the year because the teacher has already moved on.

So if you get a bad start to a math or science class, you need to double down and repair the holes immediately. If you don't, it'll only get worse. If you start a class way in over your head, consider dropping to a lower level.

Another issue with math and science is that the material tends to be dry since it involves a lot of abstract topics that don't really affect your everyday life. Good teachers will show you how the concepts apply to everyday life. If you're learning about EM waves in physics, for example, you'll also learn how your FM radio works. If you're learning about exponential functions, a teacher might take you through a simulation of compounded interest to show how much money you can make through savings.

I once heard a story about a physics teacher who was lecturing and tossed a ball at a student. The student caught it instinctively—didn't even have to think about it. The teacher said, "What your brain just did is a kinematics calculation. You knew exactly where the ball started, how it was traveling, and where it would end up. That's exactly the point of what we're learning—to mathematically predict how traveling objects will behave." I bet that teacher is awesome because that sounds a lot more interesting than just writing a formula on a whiteboard.

If you lack inspiration in math and science, try to relate what you're learning to the real world and to what you care about. If you're a news junkie, this will help you understand articles and analyses more deeply. If you're an athlete, think about how physics works in your sport. This won't always work and can sound a bit hokey, but sometimes you might be pleasantly surprised.

English and Writing Classes

In my experience the hardest part about English classes is the essay grading. Year by year, the standards you're graded on change, and the teacher's expectations change. Some teachers want you to follow the same formula essay after essay. Others want you to have a "voice" and write with style.

I had a frustrating experience in Honors English when we had to write essays about themes of books we were reading. Most people would write something like "the theme is abandonment." My teacher would draw a big red circle around this and write, "SO WHAT?" But she never explained articulately what she meant by this, even when we asked her.

Eventually, we figured out that the theme statement was supposed to be a concept that required a sentence to explain, not just a single word. This requires you to dig a level deeper, something like "abandonment is crippling to a child's psyche and ripples throughout adulthood." But she never explained it well, and it sometimes felt as if I were helpless at the hands of a merciless tyrant.

In English classes, you have to understand the expectations of your teacher and how he will be grading essays. As I said above, use every chance you have for reflection and iteration. If the teacher lets you submit drafts for review before the final essay, take this super seriously. Give the draft your best work, and if you're confused about any of the teacher's comments, ask about them outside of class.

If you don't do well on an essay, reflect on it, prepare notes, and approach the teacher and ask earnestly where your shortcomings are and how you can improve. (Measure -> Reflect -> Improve)

There are also solid foundations to effective writing, such as writing a clear thesis, using transitions between sections, employing textual evidence to support your points, and using appropriate and effective vocabulary. How to do this well is outside the scope of this article, but these are concepts you've been taught through much of English and can see every day in writing in publications such as The New York Times , The New Yorker , and The Atlantic .

Memorization-Heavy Classes, Like History and Foreign Languages

Some classes rely more heavily on factual recall than others do. In particular, I'm thinking about history classes, for which you need to memorize historical events and figures, and foreign-language classes, for which you need to build up a wide vocabulary.

Many students use flashcards for memorization, but they'll use them ineffectively. They'll just go through the entire stack from beginning to end and repeat.

This is ineffective because you end up spending the same amount of time reviewing words you already know as you do the words you have problems with. What you need to do is bias your time toward the cards you actually struggle with.

The way I do this is what I call the waterfall method of memorization. I describe this here in the context of memorizing vocab for the SAT . You cycle through the cards you don't know much more often than the cards you already know.

For long-term retention, there's also a concept known as spaced-repetition learning that spaces out your learning optimally to increase your recall of information. The idea is that right after you learn something, you should review it quickly thereafter to secure the memory. The next time you review, it can be spaced out further, and the next one even further still. Doing this regularly will lock in knowledge in the long term.

This is in contrast to the usual method of memorization, which is to cram before a test and then forget it until you need it for the final.

Anki is a good tool that does this for you automatically. Quizlet is another popular online flashcard tool where you can upload your own flashcards or use other people's flashcards.

As I mentioned above, try to find connections between things you're learning, and look for patterns. Connect historical events to each other. See foreign-language grammar rules as fitting a pattern, and notice when rules deviate from that pattern. This will make learning more interesting and help you understand concepts better.

Group Projects

This isn't a specific class, but it's a common enough issue that it's worth discussing. You'll inevitably have group projects, which means your fate is no longer 100% in your hands.

If you have a choice of partners, try to choose people who you know will do a good job. These are people who work hard and care about their grades. Friends might not be the best option if they're dead weight and you have to end up carrying them. Make it clear to the friend that it's not personal—you just don't feel you work well together. If the friend ends up dissolving your friendship because she expects you to lift her up, and it's not because you're being a jerk about it, then the friendship probably wasn't that strong to begin with.

If you don't get a choice of partners and the teacher just assigns you a group, you'll have to make do with what you have. Teachers are rarely sympathetic to complaints about your team, and it's unlikely you'll be able to change your partners. If anything, be flattered if you get paired with weaker students—the teacher might believe you'll be a positive influence on them.

Once your group is set, focus on getting a good job done. Treat it with the same care and planning as you would your own work, and don't be afraid to take charge if there hasn't been any action. Here are some tips for dealing with group projects:

• Write up the tasks that need to be done and split the work among group members. Ideally, you want to pair the tasks with people's natural skills and interests since this will maximize the overall quality of your project.
• Set up a timeline for milestones your group should hit. Make sure the group agrees on the plan and understands the details.
• Be prepared for timelines to be broken and think about what you'll do in those cases.
• Don't be afraid to take charge if there hasn't been any action.

Don't get hung up on inequality. There's sometimes that one dude who is a complete flake and never gets his job done, and you end up having to cover his ass. Don't sweat it. Focus on the big picture: your grade.

Redistribute his work to the rest of the team and revise the plan, and once again make sure the team agrees on the overall plan. Yes, the slacker might end up with a good grade riding on your backs, but he's also probably screwed for his individual assignments and for other classes. Karma works its way.

If there was anything really frustrating about the group project, you might tell the teacher. As I've said repeatedly above, the messaging to the teacher matters a lot. The teacher does not want to hear you whine about not getting a better grade because of your team. The teacher does not want to hear excuses.

The teacher does want to know of any potential problems and ways she can improve the classroom experience.

Here's an example of a bad way to talk to your teacher about a problem with your group project:

"It's unfair we got a B because of Taylor. She was supposed to do her part of the project but dropped out halfway through and we all paid for it. She should get a C and we should get an A. I didn't even want her on our team, but we didn't have a choice. Can I get a better grade?"

And here's a better way to approach your teacher:

"I wanted to let you know how our group project went since this might be helpful for our future projects. First off, I want to say that I'm not arguing for a better grade—as a group, we all share responsibility for how we did, and we deserve our grade.

So here's the story: when we started our project, we clearly divided up the work and everyone agreed on a timeline. Halfway through at our group meeting, though, Taylor said she was busy with tennis and promised to get more work done. We were all done with our parts and trusted her, which was a mistake. We ended up finding out two days before the project was due that she still hadn't done anything. We scrambled and tried to pitch in, but we were all busy so we didn't produce our best work.

I thought I'd share this story with you for future projects in case it's helpful. You should ask for her side of the story if you're interested."

This takes a totally different approach. First, you make clear that you're not arguing for a better grade upfront —this makes the teacher less suspicious of your motives, thereby encouraging her to listen to your story more intently.

Then, you present the facts, without emotional bias, and accept responsibility for your actions. You tell the teacher why this might be useful, and you exude enough maturity to suggest that you yourself might be biased so she should hear from Taylor's perspective, too.

In the worst case, the teacher ignores you. In the best case, the teacher might reconsider giving the team a bad grade if she finds out how negligent or manipulative the disappointing student was.

Don't Ignore the Easy Classes

In middle school, when I was a chubby kid, I got a B in PE.

Yep. I didn't know this was possible at the time, either.

It turns out the PE teacher gave everyone a set of physical exams—push-ups, sit-ups, stretches, and mile-run time—tallied up your points, and then gave you a grade. I did pretty poorly on all of them and ended up with a B.

You can see how many of my above rules I failed:

• I didn't have the motivation to do well since I didn't think I wouldn't get an A.
• I didn't understand early on how the class was actually going to be graded.
• Given chances for iteration cycles, I didn't reflect enough on my shortcomings and thus didn't change my method of preparing for the exams.

I freaked out and made sure I knew how PE would be graded in high school. I ran my little chubby butt off. In high school, they graded mainly on participation and attendance, so I ended up fine.

Don't let yourself miss an easy A. Understand how all of your classes are graded, even the ones that everyone thinks they'll get an A in. If you get on the bad side of your orchestra teacher, you might be surprised with your final grade.

Again, don't be a jerk about this by marching to the teacher and exclaiming, "I want to know how I can get an A in this class." Make it clear that you just want to meet the teacher's expectations and understand what exactly those are.

We've covered a lot already. Here are some last-minute pieces of advice, and then we'll wrap up with some summary points and a checklist for your academic health.

Tip 1: Get Some Objective Assistance

When you get as involved in something as coursework, it can be hard to take a step back and truly understand your shortcomings. An artist might not be the best critic of her own work.

If you have parents who care about your success and are willing to help out, send this guide to them and discuss it with them once they've read it. Talk about what parts you agree with and what skills you want to improve. Give them your goals and action plan for your high school career, each academic year, and each course. Inform them about your iteration cycles so that they can contribute new ideas about where you went wrong and how you can improve.

More importantly, don't get upset at them and accuse them of nagging when they try to help out according to the way you agreed. This just makes everyone miserable.

If your parents aren't interested in helping, find a friend who cares as much as you do about education and college, and hold each other to task. Even if you feel competitive with this friend in regard to getting into college, you'll likely lift each other to greater heights than where you would be individually.

Tip 2: Know the Trouble Signs and Act

High school can be stressful, especially if your goals are high. Not only are you preparing a strong college application, but you're also navigating the high school social scene, figuring out what you want to do in your life, and navigating your relationship with your parents. Sometimes all things come to a head, and it can be overwhelming.

Recognize trouble signs, reflect on whether they're serious problems, and act quickly if they are. Here are some important questions to ask yourself intermittently:

Are you deeply unhappy? Does every day feel like a slog to you and you're not sure why you're doing any of it? Think about the root cause of this feeling. Maybe your parents are pushing you toward a goal you don't identify with. Maybe there are conflicting aspects to your life—being better at school might mean getting ostracized socially, so you're caught in the middle. Try to reflect on this, identify any plausible root causes, and take steps to address them. (Easier said than done, I know, but you have to start somewhere.)

Are you getting seven to eight hours of sleep a night? If not, restructure your life so you get more output in less time. Chart out where your time goes every day and every week, and observe where there are possibilities for large improvements. This might mean cutting current activities and refocusing that time on something more helpful to your application.

Is one class dragging down the others? Are you spending a lot of time trying to stay afloat in one class, at the expense of your other grades? Consider dropping the course. The earlier you can detect this problem, the more easily you can avoid getting a permanent "Withdrawn" mark on your transcript. But even if it's too late to avoid this, dropping it is still preferable to failure across the board.

Finally, don't be too proud to ask for help. More people are willing to help you than you think—you just haven't asked yet. If you lack supportive parents or friends, seek help from your teachers and counselors. It might take some time and multiple tries to find someone to advocate for you, but one likely exists somewhere in your world.

If you suspect even a bit that you might have mental health concerns, seek help immediately. Again, more people are willing to help than you might think.

Tip 3: Prepare for Crunch Periods—Finals and APs

The end of each semester and academic year is typically pretty stressful. Instead of a staggered timeline, you'll get final exams in most classes all at once. Even worse, you might also have to prep separately for AP exams and the SAT / ACT .

The good news is that if you've built a strong foundation throughout the rest of the year, you're already 80% there before you study for finals. You might have forgotten some details, but the foundational tree trunks are still around. Preparing for the final is now simply a matter of loading the info into your short-term memory for recall.

If you're learning a lot of new material for a final, you're too late. Try the best you can, but next time focus on sustained effort throughout the school year.

As for AP Courses, usually getting an A in class will lead to a pretty easy 5, unless your class is really easy and A is the most common grade. Preparing for standardized tests uses the same skills and principles, no matter if it's an AP test or the SAT. I cover these principles in more detail in my guide on how to get a perfect SAT score .

Tip 4: Rinse and Repeat

High school is four years long (duh). Maintaining high performance throughout freshman to junior year requires sustained commitment, motivation, and high quality.

If you do really well on a semester, great job—take time to celebrate, but steel yourself to do it again the next semester.

The good thing is that the earlier you start building good habits, the easier it gets. If you start all of this by freshman year, senior year will be a breeze and you'll be well prepared for college.

The Grand Summary: How to Get a 4.0 GPA in High School

Notice how most of this guide has been about mindset, your personal psychology, and healthy habits. This forms an effective framework you can apply to every class and semester of school. Every important concept that got me a 4.0 GPA is written here.

Now, the hard work is actually adopting these practices and continuing to apply them through your entire high school career.

What's Next?

Looking for more tips for doing well in high school and beyond? Check out my other in-depth guides on how to get a perfect SAT / ACT score and how to get into Harvard and the Ivy League .

Prepping for the SAT or ACT? We've written the highest quality prep guides available anywhere. Browse our separate guides for each major test section:

• SAT Reading | SAT Writing | SAT Math
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• Getting Good Grades

How to Get Good Grades

Last Updated: April 15, 2024 Approved

This article was co-authored by Jennifer Kaifesh and by wikiHow staff writer, Hannah Madden . Jennifer Kaifesh is the Founder of Great Expectations College Prep, a tutoring and counseling service based in Southern California. Jennifer has over 15 years of experience managing and facilitating academic tutoring and standardized test prep as it relates to the college application process. She takes a personal approach to her tutoring, and focuses on working with students to find their specific mix of pursuits that they both enjoy and excel at. She is a graduate of Northwestern University. There are 10 references cited in this article, which can be found at the bottom of the page. wikiHow marks an article as reader-approved once it receives enough positive feedback. This article received 50 testimonials and 83% of readers who voted found it helpful, earning it our reader-approved status. This article has been viewed 2,239,235 times.

No matter how old we are, getting good grades is a goal for many of us. Juggling homework, tests, and projects can be tough, but with a little bit of effort and dedication, you can get (and keep) your grades up. Keep reading to learn how you can stay on top of your schoolwork and put your best foot forward during class.

Get a planner.

• Every day when you get home from school, check your calendar and see what needs to be done before tomorrow, as well as what's on the horizon for the next few days. Check off what you have already done so you don’t get confused.

Participate in class.

• If you’re an auditory learner, try recording the lectures so you can listen to them later on.
• Your teacher will really appreciate it if you participate, especially if you’re one of the only people doing so. And if you get on their good side, they’re more likely to be lenient on you during the grading process.

Take good notes.

• To write notes quickly, try using shorthand instead of full sentences. For instance, if you’re in math class, shorten “geometry” to “geo” and “algebra” into “alg.”
• Understand the 80/20 rule of studying: 80% of the test questions surround 20% of the most important concepts. If you are crammed for time figure out these core concepts by looking at past tests and study these first.

Ask your teacher for help.

• Often things we're told one-on-one stick with us more than things we're just being lectured about.
• If you’re a visual learner, try asking the teacher for handouts or study guides you can use.
• If you’re a hands-on learner, your teacher might have suggestions for you on how you can translate your work into good study material.

Get a tutor if you need to.

• Your school might also have a tutoring center where you can go and get help from different departments.

Joseph Meyer

Review basic concepts before diving into advanced topics. Identifying the gaps in your knowledge helps you avoid difficulties later on. Take an assessment or get your teacher's advice on where you can improve. Practice targeted exercises to build a strong foundation so you can confidently tackle new lessons.

Make a study schedule.

• Use your common sense when it comes to allotting time to specific classes. For example, Badminton needs a lot less time than the Principles of Celestial Mechanics.

Form a study group.

• This takes the information off the page and makes it fun and memorable. When you have to explain something to a friend, you think about it in a different way that can make it easier to understand.

Use memory tricks for memorization.

• Associations work, too. If you're trying to remember that India used to be a British colony, picture the queen jogging laps around the Taj Mahal. When the test comes, you may not remember what you actually should remember, but you'll remember enough to jog your memory!

Study for 10 to 20 minutes every day instead of cramming.

• Try not to pull all-nighters before a test, either. If you’re tired and groggy, you won’t be able to think clearly and effectively.

Try practice tests.

• There are tons of practice tests for big exams like the SAT or the ACT online.
• If you have trouble finding a practice test, ask your teacher to give you one.

Take 15-minute breaks every 45 minutes.

• Make sure you do something on your break that’s actually relaxing. It will help you feel rested and ready to tackle the rest of your work.

Eat a good, healthy breakfast every day.

• Pick a breakfast that’s both filling and nutritious. Go for oatmeal, toast, bagels, eggs, fresh fruit, yogurt, or granola to fuel your mind and your body.

Supercharge Your Studying with this Expert Series

Expert Q&A

Reader Videos

• Don't worry about competing with people around you, as they may have other goals. Just work hard and try to achieve your own goals for yourself. Thanks Helpful 2 Not Helpful 0
• At the end of each day, summarise the information you have learnt and put it in a different book. That way, when you want to do revision, you can see the key points quickly and easily, and not focus on the less important pieces of information. Thanks Helpful 1 Not Helpful 0

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• ↑ Jennifer Kaifesh. Academic Tutor. Expert Interview. 8 November 2019.
• ↑ https://hbculifestyle.com/improve-your-grades-in-college/
• ↑ https://math.osu.edu/undergrad/non-majors/resources/good-grade
• ↑ https://www.umassd.edu/dss/resources/students/classroom-strategies/how-to-get-good-grades/
• ↑ https://www.oxfordlearning.com/benefits-of-tutoring/
• ↑ https://www.oxfordlearning.com/studying-alone-vs-studying-in-a-group/
• ↑ https://www.oxfordlearning.com/mnemonic-devices/
• ↑ https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/releases/back-to-school-cramming-doesnt-work-in-the-long-run.html
• ↑ https://blog.collegeboard.org/how-to-improve-your-sat-score
• ↑ https://www.redcross.org.au/getmedia/f7b6f98a-e338-4734-ba14-40199f07945b/fact-sheet-4-2.pdf.aspx

About This Article

To get good grades, stay organized by keeping a planner with all of your assignments and upcoming tests in it. Make a study schedule for each week so you know exactly how much you should study for your classes. Make sure you take good notes and participate in class so you're more prepared for tests. Try to do your homework right after school every day so you don't procrastinate. If you feel like you're struggling with a subject, don't be afraid to ask your teacher for help or meet with a tutor. For more tips, like how to study for tests, keep reading! Did this summary help you? Yes No

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• 14 Ways to Improve Your Grades if You’re Underperforming

Even the brightest students can sometimes find themselves academically underperforming, often through no fault of their own. When students find themselves in this situation, it’s often because they’re stuck in a rut and are not sure what to do to improve. If this sounds like you, the first step is to work out the reasons why you may be underperforming, and the next step is to work out how to tackle the problem. If you’re not sure how to go about it, this article shows you what you can do to form an improvement plan to help you achieve the grades you know you’re capable of achieving.

1. Adopt a positive mental attitude

In the face of lower-than-expected grades, it’s only human to react by feeling disappointed with oneself. When you’re frequently receiving lower grades than you’d hoped for, you may start to feel depressed or defeated, and feel like giving up. The first step on the road to improving your grades is to turn this negativity on its head. You need to be positive about the situation if you’re to stand a chance of improving it. Acknowledge that your grades aren’t what you’re aiming for, but believe that you can do something about it. Start by mentally taking control of the situation: instead of thinking “I’m a failure”, think “I can and will do better than this.” Don’t give up – take positive steps towards achieving the improvement you’re more than capable of achieving.

2. Work out where you’re falling short

You need to work out which areas need targeting before you can draw up a plan of action, so the next step is to figure out the areas in which you’re underperforming, and why. Are your grades consistently lower than you’d like them to be across all your subjects, or is there one particular area you’re struggling with that’s bringing down your overall performance in a particular subject? Take a look at your grades over the last few months and look for patterns. Has there been a general decline in academic achievement, or have your grades in certain areas always been lower than you’d hoped? Are your grades always low in the same areas, such as one problem subject? You’ll probably already have a vague idea of the answers to these questions, but seeing your grades written down on paper – perhaps even in graph format – can help you see things more clearly. Next, think about the reasons why you’re not performing to your full academic potential in the areas you’ve identified. Are there external factors that may be negatively affecting your grades, such as a family problem or worrying about a social situation at school? Are you struggling with any particular academic skills that might be dragging you down, such as essay-writing or note-taking? And are you studying in a way that works for you? These are all factors that could be affecting your academic performance, so once you’ve isolated what the problem is – it could be a combination of more than one of these issues – you’ll be able to start tackling it. If the problems are external, you’ll need to take steps towards getting them to a point at which they no longer adversely affect your studies; seeing a counsellor might help, for instance. If they’re academic, read the rest of this article for some suggestions on how you can improve.

3. Talk to your teachers

Your teachers know you best, so it’s worth talking to them when you’re drawing up a plan of action for improving your grades. Ask them where they think you need to improve, and they’ll probably have some advice on how you can go about it. Coupled with the advice in the rest of this article, this should allow you to tailor an action plan to your personal situation.

4. Pay more attention in class – and ask questions

If you’re prone to daydreaming in class, it’s time to start focusing on the here and now. Listen to what the teacher is saying rather than talking with friends or allowing your mind to wander. Don’t simply copy down what’s on the board without thinking about it; make sure you’ve understood it, make neat notes so that you can understand them when you come back to them (more on that later), and don’t be afraid to speak up if there’s something you don’t understand or want clarifying. It’s much easier to ask a teacher to explain something differently than it is to trawl through books trying to find a clearer explanation for yourself, and they won’t think less of you for asking.

5. Start organising your life

Clutter of any kind inhibits our ability to operate efficiently, so another way of improving your academic performance is to get organised. Keep your workspace tidy and all your notes and textbooks organised in such a way that you know where everything is. Start thinking more about your time management, too, as this will allow you to prioritise your time effectively, freeing time for problem subjects. Write yourself a daily timetable that incorporates your school schedule, dividing your day into slots of time and fitting in plenty of time for studying. Allocate extra time to subjects or topics you’ve identified as being ones you’re struggling with; it could be that the reason for your underperformance in these subjects is that you’re simply not devoting enough time to them.

6. Improve your note-taking skills

One of the reasons you may have identified for underperforming is that you’re not taking good enough notes. Hurriedly scrawled notes from class can be difficult to make sense of when you come to revise from them, or even to write an essay based on them. It’s all too easy to misunderstand your own notes and fail to get a strong enough grasp of the topic. It’s imperative, therefore, that you produce good notes from each of your classes and from the books you use – notes that you can read, that are useful, and that are logically organised. If you make notes by hand – in class, for example – try to type them up at the end of the day, while they’re still fresh in your mind.

7. Improve your essay-writing skills

Another common reason for academic underperformance is that the student’s essay-writing skills aren’t sufficient for the level required to achieve top grades. This is fairly easily fixed by improving your essay-writing technique. Good essay technique covers all aspects of essay-writing, from the research phase to the final proofread, and even how you respond to the feedback you get for your essays. Responding in the right way to feedback – and not taking criticism personally – will be particularly useful if you feel you’re underperforming, as this should give you the guidance you need to be able to improve.

8. Find the right learning style for you

If you’re academically underperforming, another possible reason could be that you haven’t found the right learning style for you. We’re all different, and each of us has our own way of studying that yields the best results. Perhaps you just haven’t found your most effective studying style yet. If you’ve been trying to work on your own, for example, you might find it easier to work with a friend or two, so that you have someone else there to motivate you.

9. Improve your memory

Many students struggle to remember all the information they need for exams, and this brings their grades down. With so much to learn across many subjects, remembering facts, figures and arguments is a pretty monumental task, and you need to arm yourself with some effective memory aids to help you. You’ll find more tips on improving your memory in our article on memory techniques for exam preparation.

10. Stop procrastinating

One of the reasons why you’re underperforming could be that you’re spending too much time procrastinating – that is, putting off work by distracting yourself with other things, such as social media. This is a common response to a big workload; when you have so much to do that you don’t know where to start, the temptation is simply not to start. The problem is that in doing so, you’re delaying the inevitable, as well as making your task worse by eating into the time when you could be productive. If you’re guilty of procrastination – and we all are at some point or another – take a look at our article on five reasons we procrastinate and how to stop it.

11. Allow plenty of time for revision

If you’re achieving lower scores than you’d hoped for on timed tests or mock exams, it could be because you’re not allowing enough time for revising for them. This may be because you know it’s not ‘the real thing’, but practice exams are just as important as real ones. They show you which areas you need to spend more time on, and achieving good grades in them will give you a confidence boost. Treat them as seriously as you would a real exam, allowing yourself plenty of time to revising for them. Better still, revise everything you learn as you go along, so that you learn it properly first time round and have less need for revision. Also, be sure to read our articles on effective revision techniques for science students and humanities students.

12. Make learning more fun

Sometimes students underperform because they have simply lost the motivation to learn. It’s not surprising, when the pressure of exams and doing well at school takes away the enjoyment of learning. It’s easy to get so focused on achieving top grades that you forget that learning can actually be fun – and not only that, but it’s much easier to do well when you’re enjoying it. If studying has become a chore for you, it’s time to put the fun back into learning. You could do this by gamifying your studies, or by trying some of the ideas in our article on 15 ways to make studying less stressful.

13. Hire a private tutor

As a last resort, if the ideas in this article haven’t worked for you, you might consider hiring a private tutor to help you improve your grades for a particularly tricky subject. Some extra tuition may be just what you need to help bring your grade up, as you’ll benefit from one-to-one tuition in an environment in which you might feel more able to ask questions without the fear of speaking up in front of your peers. If you think this would help you, speak to your parents and suggest that they place an advert in the local paper if they’re willing to cover the cost of private tuition for you.

14. Go on a summer school

A final option – best taken alongside the other advice in this article, rather than instead of it – is to book yourself onto an academic summer school. Taking part in a summer school would allow you to learn away from the pressures of the classroom and exams, reinvigorating your love of learning and inspiring you to take a more determined approach to your studies. What’s more, summer schools are great for helping you get to grips with trickier subjects, so this could be a good solution to your underperforming subjects as well. Take a look at our Oxford summer school courses to find one to help you start improving your grades. It’s not just an option in the summer – ever-popular Easter revision courses are a great way to get a boost shortly before your exams.

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• All Chicago Booth Review Topics

Should We Pay Students for Good Grades?

• By Ed Robinson
• May 24, 2016
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Cash rewards can help motivate students to achieve good results—but the effect may not last long enough to get some kids to graduation, according to a randomized field study involving high schoolers and their parents.

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University of Chicago’s Steven D. Levitt  and John A. List  and UC San Diego’s Sally Sadoff  conducted an eight-month experiment—dubbed the “Chicago Heights Miracle”—at schools in Chicago Heights, Illinois, a suburb 30 miles south of Chicago, whose school district has low student achievement and high dropout rates. The researchers set up a program to give money to freshmen who met goals related to grades, standardized-test scores, attendance, and behavior.

A number of recent research studies have looked into whether students respond to cash incentives. Levitt, List, and Sadoff went beyond prior research by involving parents as well as students, and by varying the kinds of rewards, making some fixed and others awarded by lottery.

Over a school year, the researchers paid cash incentives to four randomly chosen groups of students and their parents. Some received monthly fixed payments of $50 for meeting goals, while others were entered into a lottery with a 10 percent chance of receiving $500. The researchers tracked students for up to five years to measure the program’s impact.

Both incentives had a modest impact on students’ performance. Only a quarter of the students in the control group met academic standards, but students who qualified for the incentives did about 5 percentage points better. The results were driven most by students who qualified for the incentives and were on the threshold of meeting the academic standards. They did about 10 percentage points better than those in the control group, and were about 15 percentage points more likely to be on track to graduate during that first year.

However, those effects lasted only two years. In the second year, students who had been on the verge of meeting standards were still performing 12 percent better than their peers who hadn’t received any incentives.

“If the short-term effects had sustained themselves, it would have been at a cost of $1,200 per graduate,” says List. “But since the effects faded out, we do not have a significant impact on graduation.”

Works Cited

Steven D. Levitt, John A. List, and Sally Sadoff, “The Short and Long Term Effects of Performance-Based Incentives on Educational Achievement: Evidence from a Randomized Experiment,” Working paper, May 2016.

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• Writing Tips

How to Boost Your Grades: 6 Superb Essay Writing Tips

3-minute read

• 23rd August 2020

If you put everything you have into your essays yet still fall short of the grades you want, it might simply be a matter of refining your essay-writing technique . Luckily, there’s plenty you can do to earn a few extra marks. If you want to boost your grades, then, give these tips a try.

1. Master Time Management

If you start writing your essay the night before the deadline, it’s unlikely to end well. Make sure to set aside time for researching, writing a first draft, re-writing and editing. If you start planning as soon as the assignment is set, you should be able to write a great essay without having to rush!

2. Read Widely

When researching your essay, look beyond the set texts. It might be possible to write your whole essay based upon the course materials and lecture notes. However, if you want to ensure a good grade, you need to demonstrate your ability to conduct independent research.

3. Check the Marking Criteria

Marking criteria are issued by colleges as guidelines for academic staff when marking work. As such, they provide a breakdown of how marks are awarded. Checking the marking criteria for your course or school can therefore help you hone your essays.

4. Write Concisely

Less is often more in academic writing, as overly wordy essays can be difficult to follow. Being concise , on the other hand, will boost the clarity of your written work and make your arguments more persuasive.

5. Always Edit!

Finishing the first draft of an essay is not the same as finishing your essay, as you still need to edit what you’ve written.

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Subscribe to our newsletter and get writing tips from our editors straight to your inbox.

The first step here is to read everything back carefully, correcting typos and other errors. But editing is also an opportunity to look for passages that you could phrase more clearly or improve your arguments.

From a clarity point of view, things to keep an eye out for while editing include redundancy , convoluted sentences , and anything not strictly relevant to the point you’re making in your essay.

6. Double Check Everything!

Once you’ve written a first draft and edited ruthlessly, there’s still one thing to do before submitting your work: double check everything!

Having your work proofread professionally is obviously helpful, but even if you don’t you should print out your essay and read it through to look for any remaining issues. It’s vital to check your referencing at this point, because clearly citing sources can win you the last few marks required!

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What Happens When Parents Pressure Kids to Get Good Grades

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If you want your children to get good grades, you should make sure they know that's your expectation. Right? Maybe not. Research shows that kids may interpret these expectations as pressure. And pressure to perform doesn't help them succeed.

What children think their parents want for them can play a significant role in shaping the children's chances of future success. Parental pressure to excel can increase kids' risk of stress , as well as have a negative impact on their well-being. This is especially true if parents value grades and achievement over things like empathy , compassion, kindness , and social skills.

Kindness Counts

Researchers at Arizona State University set out to investigate what role parents’ attitudes played on kids’ psychological health and academic performance. They asked 506 sixth graders from an affluent community to rank the top three things they believed their parents wanted for them, from a list of six options.

Three of the values had to do with personal success, such as getting good grades and having a successful career later in life. The other three values had to do with kindness and decency toward other people. They then compared these responses to how well the children did at school, looking at both grades and behavior reports.  

The best outcomes were among kids who believed that their parents valued kindness as much as or more than personal achievements.

On the other hand, children who saw their parents as putting more emphasis on achievements over being kind to others were more likely to experience negative outcomes, such as depression, anxiety, lower self-esteem , behavior problems , criticism from parents, learning problems—and lower grades.  

The clear message: When parents push achievement over compassion and decency, it sets the stage for stress, depression, anxiety, and poorer grades, which can be seen as early as the sixth grade. “Even when only one parent emphasized academic performance, grades were poorer,” says study co-author Suniya Luthar, PhD, professor of psychology at Arizona State University.

How to Encourage Your Kids

How children perceive their parents' values plays a significant role in kids’ development, especially as they approach adolescence. Children entering middle school are going through a lot of changes, figuring out who they are and what they think about the world around them. In this time of big transitions, parents’ attitudes about achievement, the examples they set, and their parenting style can have a big impact.

There's nothing wrong with encouraging kids to try their best. Problems come up when parents push, criticize, and send the message that kids need to win at all costs, or that their self-esteem should come from external validations (like awards or top grades) instead of positive relationships with others. Use these methods to help kids succeed while supporting them in a healthy, productive way.

Don't Focus Too Much on Hard Work

“If you are a parent who is hard-working, has a good career, and a good income, it doesn’t help to push your child,” says Dr. Luthar. Your actions set a clear example, and it's not necessary to constantly repeat the message that they need to get good grades. Instead, be there to support your kids when they hit a problem and let them know that they should be proud of their best efforts.

Don't Emphasize Winning

“The rest of the world is giving children the message that they need to hurry up and do better; there’s no getting away from that,” says Dr. Luthar. Given how much pressure kids already face to succeed, it’s more important than ever for parents to focus on good values and provide a safe space where kids feel supported.

Don't Criticize

A sure-fire way to dent kids' self-esteem is to point out their shortcomings and focus on what they did wrong. Instead, help your children come up with ways to solve problems, and let them know that you are proud of their efforts. Stay positive and help them see solutions instead of going negative and harping on the problems.

Another research study, from 2015, found that lectures and punishments are a counterproductive response to bad grades. What actually works: warm parent-child interactions and a home environment that supports and stimulates learning.  

Give the Message That Kindness Counts

As Dr. Luthar's research clearly shows, win-at-all-cost attitudes backfire in the long run. Talk to your kids about the importance of having integrity, showing respect, and exhibiting good manners . Discuss why being unkind , backstabbing others, or being selfish or spoiled can harm relationships. Remind them that friends and family are as important as achievements and awards (if not more so).

Be Consistent in Words and Actions

If you tell your child that you'll be happy as long as they try their best, but then criticize them when they don't win or become angry when they don't earn an A+ in every class: Remember that actions can often speak louder than words, especially when it comes to kids' perceptions.

A Word From Verywell

Encouraging your child to be their best is a good thing, as long as you give them some perspective and do it in moderation. A certain amount of anxiety is good (and can help kids do well on a test, for instance), but too much can be crippling, says Dr. Luthar. Telling kids that only winning counts is "too much of a good thing, with frightening consequences," says Dr. Luthar.

Ciciolla L, Curlee AS, Karageorge J, Luthar SS. When mothers and fathers are seen as disproportionately valuing achievements: Implications for adjustment among upper middle class youth . J Youth Adolesc . 2017;46(5):1057-1075. doi:10.1007/s10964-016-0596-x

Tang S, Davis-Kean PE. The association of punitive parenting practices and adolescent achievement . J Fam Psychol . 2015;29(6):873-83. doi:10.1037/fam0000137

By Katherine Lee Katherine Lee is a parenting writer and a former editor at Parenting and Working Mother magazines.

14 Pros and Cons of Getting Paid for Good Grades – Should Students Get Paid

Parents have paid their children for good grades for decades. This trend is now starting to catch on in school districts across the United States as a way to encourage positive behaviors. Cash incentives are one of several rewards that students can earn when their grades for a semester or evaluation period reach specific levels. It is an option based on the scores of standardized tests as well.

Although students certainly welcome the idea of receiving extra cash for doing a good job in school, there is still a question that remains. Is paying them for excellent grades something that helps their academic future, or does it provide harm in the long run that could create unreasonable expectations?

Should students get paid for their development as a way to offset the bonds of poverty, or does it adversely impact them for the challenges that they will face in the future?

There are several pros and cons to consider when paying for good grades that provide a legitimate argument for both perspectives.

List of the Pros of Paying Students for Good Grades

1. Cash and other forms of payment provide an incentive to study. Kids are spending up to eight hours per day in school as early as the first grade. That’s the same amount of time that their parents spend at their job. If adults get paid for their commitment to working, then shouldn’t students receive the same incentive? Money and other valuable rewards are fantastic motivators when there is something that is needed or wanted. Paying for good grades can keep kids and teens engaged with their studies while helping them to avoid the need to work somewhere to support themselves.

2. Paying for grades is an easy way to help underprivileged children. When children come from poor economic circumstances then they are more likely to drop out of school before graduation. This result happens because their family needs them to start working a job. It doesn’t matter what their employment pays because every little bit helps to keep food on the table and a roof over their heads. That means there is no time or energy to go to school.

Paying students for grades can help families to make ends meet in this situation. Students typically enroll in more classes when cash incentives are available. Kids feel better about themselves because they are contributing to their overall needs. It also means they’re more likely to maintain a C average or better.

3. There is more financial freedom for students. Many students graduate from high school without any idea of how to manage their finances. Kids often ask for something, and then get what they want. Some might even argue that the parenting perspective from today is that children can have whatever they desire without really needing to work for it. By paying them for their good grades, then students can experience what it feels like to get something after actually earning it. That means more financial freedom occurs because it is easier to recognize the value of each dollar earned.

Parents can expand this benefit by encouraging their students to open a savings account with the money they receive from their good grades.

4. It provides an opportunity for vocational training. Our world operates on the idea that if you put in the work, you should get paid for the results you create. Schools already operate on the idea that putting in hard work gives you the reward of a good grade. That works for some students, but not for others. Offering money as a “paycheck” shows that doing hard work can create tangible rewards as well. For students who want a job and aren’t old enough to get one, this benefit allows them to earn the money for the expensive things they want over time.

5. Paying students doesn’t need to involve only their grades. In New York City, an experimental group of 15,000 students in the fourth and seventh grade were given performance incentives based on the results of computerized, pencil, and paper predictive exams. All fourth graders earned $5 for a completed test and $25 if they achieved a perfect score. The seventh graders had their rewards doubled. The average fourth grader earned $139.43 from the study, while the seventh graders earned $231.55 and both groups so their scores rise.

6. It can help students to start paying for college. If students do receive money for their good grades, then it would create an opportunity for them to start saving for college. Tuition costs continue to rise, even for in-state students, and that can make it more of a challenge to earn a desired degree. Schools could even give the parents the money instead of the kids or deposit the earnings in a savings account that can build in value over the course of their educational career. It might cost more for taxpayers to use this type of system to support public school budgets, but the results could help more kids (especially from poor neighborhoods) find a way to change their overall life circumstances.

List of the Cons of Paying Students for Good Grades

1. It provides a short-term solution to a long-term problem. Paying students for good grades can provide some community benefits, but it doesn’t change the overall problem that faces society. Different children are going to perform better when money is an incentive. Kids who have a desire to learn will continue to benefit from that trait whether they get paid for it or not. A child who has no desire to learn will only work hard when the cash payments have value. If that value disappears, then so does the work ethic.

The reality of learning opportunities in the United States is that families with more resources get to send their kids to better schools. Paying for good grades is not going to change the economic depravity that exists in many inner cities. We must change at a societal level more than we need classrooms to evolve.

2. There are questions of morality to consider with this approach. Some see the idea of paying students for good grades as a form of bribery. When someone comes from this perspective, then it will be seen as wrong in any light. Allowing kids to accept the idea of a monetary bribe in exchange for specific results can prove to be detrimental to their decision-making processes in the future. You never know what someone might agree to do in exchange for the promise of another cash payment. That is why it is imperative to teach students the value of good grades in relation to their future expectations.

3. It only works when the reward has some level of value. People work hard at any age when they feel that the reward for their work is consistent with the output they present. Students will work for money as long as the amount that they earn for good grades can meet their needs. If there is no incentive to work harder beyond their basic grades, then they won’t do it. Someone with A-grade capability might settle for C-grade results because that’s the amount of money that they want or need. Anything else is a bonus, but they won’t start working hard for it.

4. The best students will still dominate the cash rewards. The only way that a cash reward system for grades can work is if every student receives an opportunity to earn the same amount. Even when this setup is in place, the students who consistently achieve good grades will still make the most money. Some children may have dyslexia or other learning disabilities that cause them to struggle. Unless there is some way to create a sliding scale of compensation, it may be challenging for some students to maximize results.

If students study harder than those who make good grades and earn less of a financial incentive for their work, then the results of this effort will typically fail.

5. It doesn’t improve student attendance. There have been a handful of studies over the years that have looked at paying students for their attendance and grades. Chelsea High School in Massachusetts was part of the research ground, handing out students a $25 reward for every perfect attendance record during a school term. They ran the program from 2004-2008, but it produced almost no change to the students’ academic performance or overall attendance.

When younger students receive incentives, the rate of students missing 15+ days during the school year does decrease by up to 10%. The value of the reward determines the results. At Stone Creek Elementary School in Georgia, kids could earn a video game console – a much more exciting prospect.

6. Rewards don’t foster the right attitude for learning. When students have access to rewards for their schoolwork and grades, then it changes their attitude about learning. Instead of seeking knowledge, kids begin to wonder what is in it for them every time an assignment comes their way. It sends the message that the reason to work hard and stay in school is to make your bank account fatter instead of growing the knowledge you keep in your mind. That also means dangling carrots in front of the kids creates an attitude of manipulation from the adults in the life of each child instead of teaching them the value of a meaningful education.

7. Incentives rob children of intrinsic rewards of learning. The children who earn rewards for good grades can begin to feel entitled about their payouts. This emotional response will eventually rob the child of their ability to cultivate a new love of learning. It also shifts the sense of responsibility from themselves to others for their own education. Instead of paying for a specific grade that may not represent anything, parents and administrators may find it more useful to help kids develop the personal skills needed to grow in other areas of life.

You can still incentivize children without giving them money. Your home can structure screen time after homework so that you create a when-then culture. “When you get your studies done, then you can have some video game fun. Choose not to rescue them from their poor choices as well so that they will need to organize their time by themselves. Then emphasize the action of learning instead of the specific grades.

8. There is no guarantee that the money would go to useful things. Students might spend their class earnings of cigarettes or drugs instead of toward items they need for their education. Parents could do the same thing if given the funds instead. This disadvantage could occur in any school district or community because drug addiction is not limited to those with financial disadvantages. That’s why a careful accounting of the money and placement in an account or trust that cannot be touched except by a college, vocational school, or authorized apprenticeship program might be the best way to handle this possible incentive.

Verdict of the Pros and Cons of Paying Students for Grades

Going to school is the “job” of the student. It is not the parent’s responsibility to hold down this position and juggle their career too. At some point in life, a child must make their own decisions about their future. When you can show them that there is a reward for good studying habits (whether the grades come with them or not), then you’re setting them up for a positive life experience.

Paying for grades can provide short-term results in some disadvantaged neighborhoods. It can reduce the need for students to drop out to find a supportive job for their families. These issues may be the exception to the rule of financial support.

The pros and cons of paying students for good grades depends on the effectiveness of the solution. There will be some kids motivated by this approach to learning, but there will also be others who are turned off by the idea of this “bribe.” That is why many schools use positive reinforcement and non-cash-based rewards like books, pencils, or clothing as a way to enhance motivation.

NFL draft grades: Bears, Steelers lead best team classes as Cowboys stumble

The 2024 NFL draft is complete – which naturally means it’s time to prematurely dissect, parse, overanalyze and, yes, grade it. That’s the world we live in, and that’s what you want even if it takes about three seasons to really get a fair read on any team’s rookie crop. (Just think back to the top-heavy quarterback draft of 2021, four of those five Round 1 passers already on different teams – and who expected that at the time?)

No matter, fearlessly forge ahead we will, though one note about the methodology: As I grade each team, the goal is to pull back for a big-picture look at its performance holistically rather than judging from a narrow perspective that doesn't include trades and other considerations that more accurately frame the decisions.

With that in mind, here are your ridiculously hasty 2024 NFL draft grades, with team classes ranked from best to worst:

1. Chicago Bears (A+)

Duh. They got this draft’s best player, USC QB Caleb Williams, off the top and – perhaps – its next best in Washington WR Rome Odunze at No. 9. Kudos to GM Ryan Poles for the forward-looking trade of the No. 1 pick last year to Carolina, a deal that ultimately netted the franchise-shifting selection of Williams – opportunity being the convergence of luck and preparation and all that. There’s more. Last season’s trade deadline move for DE Montez Sweat for a second-rounder was the right call, expensive as it was. Round 5 pass rusher Austin Booker from Kansas has a chance to really shine on an already fortified defense. Even impressive Iowa P Tory Taylor is a weapon – and one getting some early ribbing from Williams.

NFL DRAFT HUB: Latest NFL Draft mock drafts, news, live picks, grades and analysis.

As Poles said, “It’s gonna be really hard to make this team." And that was before the draft. Salute.

2. Pittsburgh Steelers (A+)

After HC Mike Tomlin and GM Omar Khan upgraded their quarterback options via Groupon during free agency, the team proceeded to conduct what looks like a monster rookie haul. Top picks Troy Fautanu (Round 1, Washington) and Zach Frazier (Round 2, West Virginia) – along with 2023 first-rounder Broderick Jones – should immediately remediate an offensive line that will be expected to refuel the run game new OC Arthur Smith will doubtless lean on. “We just want to roll people,” Tomlin said Saturday on NFL Network.

Third-round WR Roman Wilson (Michigan) is a home run hitter who could immediately compete for the starting job opposite George Pickens. But the lottery pick could be Round 3 LB Payton Wilson (North Carolina State), who has first-round talent if a 12th-round medical history. But he could be a dynamically impactful X-factor next to free agent addition Patrick Queen.

3. Philadelphia Eagles (A)

They got, arguably, the draft’s best defensive back (Toledo first-rounder Quinyon Mitchell). They got, arguably, the draft’s most athletic and versatile defensive back (Iowa second-rounder Cooper DeJean). Third-rounder pass rusher Jalyx Hunt is an intriguing project, and fourth-round Clemson RB Will Shipley could maximize the plays Saquon Barkley takes off. Michigan G Trevor Keegan and Florida State WR Johnny Wilson are high-ceiling Day 3 picks, and fifth-round Clemson LB Jeremiah Trotter Jr. puts the cherry on top with the sentimental homecoming factor … at a position that’s seemingly been unsettled since dad left.

4. Los Angeles Chargers (A)

Maybe it was a microcosm of the new identity they want to forge, but HC Jim Harbaugh and GM Joe Hortiz didn’t get cute in their first draft – steadily plucking quality players who addressed their needs (and/or philosophy) in a windfall that should have this relative rebuild or retool well ahead of schedule. First-round OT Joe Alt (Notre Dame), second-round WR Ladd McConkey (Georgia), third-round LB Junior Colson (Michigan) and fourth-round DL Justin Eboigbe (Alabama) could all be opening day starters, Alt’s prodigious talent clearly trumping the fact he exclusively played left tackle for the Irish and will now have to adjust to the right side opposite established Pro Bowler Rashawn Slater. Seventh-round WRs Brenden Rice (USC) – Jerry's son – and Cornelius Johnson (Michigan) could push to play quickly given the state of the depth chart at that position. Who had it better than the Bolts? (Almost) nobody.

5. New York Giants (A)

The Daniel Jones haters may not be mollified, but given the team was wed to him contractually this season anyway, GM Joe Schoen and HC Brian Daboll went about the draft the right way. First-round WR Malik Nabers (LSU) should be a field-flipping asset to Jones and/or whomever eventually replaces him. Third-round Kentucky CB Dru Phillips will compete against anybody. Some second-round maneuvering over the past few months netted highly regarded Minnesota S Tyler Nubin and former Panthers pass rusher Brian Burns, who's already signed an extension and now bookends Kayvon Thibodeaux. Solid-plus.

6. Washington Commanders (A-)

No. 2 overall pick Jayden Daniels (LSU) could be their galvanizing, long-sought franchise quarterback after the previous regime spent years kicking that can down the road. Second-round DT Johnny Newton (Illinois) and DB Mike Sainristil (Michigan) could be foundational players for the incoming staff … though Newton’s arrival seems to signal Jonathan Allen or Daron Payne could be a short-timer. And it’s worth wondering if the former decision-makers did the current ones a disservice by dealing Sweat as pass rush is still an issue here. Third-round WR Luke McCaffrey certainly has the bloodlines – and maybe the talent to be an impact target for Daniels from the slot.

7. Los Angeles Rams (A-)

They drafted in Round 1 for the first time in eight years, which kicked off a run that seemed to bring four immediate contributors in the first three rounds: Edge rusher Jared Verse (Round 1), DT Braden Fiske (Round 2) – the former Florida State teammates thrilled to transfer once again and reunite ahead of their collective task to replace retired DL Aaron Donald – before Michigan RB Blake Corum and Miami (Fla.) S Kamren Kinchens landed in Round 3. The loss of Donald is massive figuratively and literally, but it feels like a team that’s turned over so extensively since its Super Bowl 56 triumph remains firmly on the upswing.

8. Indianapolis Colts (A-)

They might have gotten the draft’s best defender, UCLA pass rusher Laiatu Latu at No. 15 before getting a Round 1-caliber wideout in Adonai Mitchell at No. 52 – and he arrives carrying an ax to grind with the rest of the league. Mid-round O-line upgrades (Pitt’s Matt Goncalves and Wisconsin’s Tanor Bortolini) are rarely a bad idea, though a corner in one of those spots might have made more sense.

9. Minnesota Vikings (A-)

After losing QB Kirk Cousins in free agency , they went on the offensive and obtained a second first-round choice from Houston last month – a move presumed to necessitate a subsequent climb up the board. But GM Kwesi Adofo-Mensah played his cards right and got to select twice in Round 1 – coming away with highly regarded but highly divisive Michigan QB J.J. McCarthy and highly regarded (period) Alabama pass rusher Dallas Turner. The third-round spot was cashed in two years ago as part of a trade deadline deal for Pro Bowl TE T.J. Hockenson. The kicking game should be boosted by sixth-rounder Will Reichard of the Crimson Tide.

10. Green Bay Packers (B+)

Maybe not supremely sexy – again, no Round 1 wideout – but just another solid job by GM Brian Gutekunst. First-round OT Jordan Morgan (Arizona), second-round LB Edgerrin Cooper (Texas A&M), second-round S Javon Bullard (Georgia) and third-round RB MarShawn Lloyd (USC) should all be cheaper, more effective upgrades for David Bakhtiari, De’Vondre Campbell, Darnell Savage and AJ Dillon, respectively, Dillon the only who returns (and probably only for 2024). However nitpickers will note none but Morgan play a premium position. Still, last year’s trade of QB Aaron Rodgers helped to enable this talent intake for a team that’s looking increasingly bulletproof around second-year starting QB Jordan Love.

11. Houston Texans (B+)

It’s a really difficult draft to parse in a big-picture way. They used their first-rounder in a deal to get DE Will Anderson Jr. last year, and he wound up as the league’s Defensive Rookie of the Year. They sent their final first-rounder from Cleveland in the Deshaun Watson offload to Minnesota for, in part, two second-rounders – one of those already used to obtain WR Stefon Diggs from Buffalo , who’s now on a one-year deal. From a draft acquisition perspective, GM Nick Caserio continued resourcing a 23rd-ranked pass defense with second-round CB Kamari Lassiter (Georgia) and third-round DB Calen Bullock (USC) – though questions linger regarding whether either is up to the job. Round 2 OT Blake Fisher (Notre Dame) could push to play on the right side by Week 1, but C.J. Stroud insurance is a good idea in any case.

12. Seattle Seahawks (B)

Potential thievery with Texas DT Byron Murphy II, likely a linchpin of new HC Mike Macdonald’s defense going forward, coming with the 16th pick. Third-round G Christian Haynes (Connecticut) addresses a desperate need on the other line. And good thing veteran DL Leonard Williams, acquired for this year’s second-rounder at the 2023 trade deadline, decided to stick around and re-sign.

13. Baltimore Ravens (B)

When you’re drafting at the end of every round, maybe you reach just a little in spots. Yet it seems like they did a good job – per usual – marrying value, talent and need. First-round CB Nate Wiggins (Clemson) is a supreme athlete, and his tackling will improve – because the Ravens will demand that. Second-rounder Roger Rosengarten (Washington) should be the new right tackle, while third round OLB Adisa Isaac (Penn State) could be a factor on passing downs straight away. And the value picks kicked in on Day 3 with deep threat WR Devontez Walker (North Carolina) and CB T.J. Tampa (Iowa State), who could give Wiggins a battle to get on the field first.

14. Detroit Lions (B)

They’ve now tripled down an 27th-ranked pass defense, drafting CBs Terrion Arnold (Round 1) and Ennis Rakestraw (Round 2) – they join trade arrival Carlton Davis III – as this team continues to load up for the ever-elusive Super Bowl run. Alabama’s charismatic Arnold, in particular, should be a great culture fit and beloved figure in Motown based on his reception from the locals Thursday night.

15. New York Jets (B)

For a team with a win-now mandate, might it have made more sense to take Georgia TE Brock Bowers at No. 11 and add to the offensive line depth – given its eminent availability in this draft – later? TBD. But coming away with Penn State All-American LT Olu Fashanu in the first round and Western Kentucky WR Malachi Corley in the third could also be a winning combo given the latter’s ability to make an immediate splash as a pure playmaker between WRs Garrett Wilson and Mike Williams. Fourth-round RB Braelon Allen (Wisconsin) and fifth-round QB Jordan Travis (Florida State) and CB Qwan'tez Stiggers (Toronto Argonauts) are the kind of mid-rounders who have the talent to pay off very handsomely. Though the (tarnished) silver lining of Rodgers’ Achilles injury last season was the Jets’ retention of their 2024 first-round pick, this season will decidedly determine if he was worth what they surrendered, including this year’s Round 2 slot. And give Douglas credit as the Fashanu pick and deal to get a third-rounder in 2025 are the moves of a GM operating as if he’ll be on the job a year from now … though unloading DL John Franklin-Myers to Denver for a 2026 sixth-rounder was baffling.

16. Kansas City Chiefs (B)

Perhaps the anti-Jets, taking the superfluous receiver (Texas blazer Xavier Worthy) in Round 1 before the offensive lineman (BYU OT Kingsley Suamataia) they arguably should have prioritized in Round 2? And, again, maybe the league’s new dynasty shouldn’t be questioned – Worthy’s 4.21 speed added to free agent signing Hollywood Brown, and what they could mean to an offense triggered by three-time Super Bowl MVP Patrick Mahomes … assuming the three-time Super Bowl MVP remains upright behind whoever’s guarding his blind side.

17. San Francisco 49ers (B)

First-round Florida WR Ricky Pearsall and second-round Florida State CB Renardo Green have the ability to contribute heavily to another Super Bowl push while also being foundational pieces beyond 2024 – especially if Pearsall has to eventually replace former Arizona State teammate Brandon Aiyuk's production. Third-round OL Dominick Puni (Kansas) might also crack the rotation this season but many of the players might struggle to make this roster – one reason the Niners spun two of their 10 picks into future drafts.

18. Cincinnati Bengals (B)

Felt like your typically solid, if often unspectacular, Cincy draft – first-round OT Amarius Mims (Georgia), second-round DT Kris Jenkins (Michigan) and third-round WR Jermaine Burton (Alabama) all virtually certain to be starters … no later than 2025. No panic here at all despite those trade demands by DE Trey Hendrickson and WR Tee Higgins.

19. Buffalo Bills (B)

A team with a clear receiver need following the trade of Diggs and departure of Gabe Davis took some heat Thursday for dropping out of Round 1 rather than aggressively targeting a replacement. Yet in a deep wideout draft, GM Brandon Beane did just fine, getting Florida State’s Keon Coleman, arguably a first-round talent, at the top of Round 2 – and even if he isn’t a blazer, he’s fast enough, catches contested balls and will provide QB Josh Allen with a big target. Win, especially with a bonus of additional picks for a team that was depleted by salary-cap reckoning. Second-round S Cole Bishop is unlikely to make anyone forget Jordan Poyer or Micah Hyde. Third-round DT DeWayne Carter should have an impact on the pass rush and could quickly emerge as a new defensive leader. And while signing undrafted free agent RB Frank Gore Jr. will garner headlines, fourth-rounder Ray Davis (Kentucky) could be the one who makes hay while easing the load on James Cook.

20. Arizona Cardinals (B-)

They didn’t overthink it off the top, staying put at No. 4 for Ohio State WR stud Marvin Harrison Jr. before getting Mizzou DL Darius Robinson at the bottom of Round 1. Second-round CB Max Melton also has huge upside at a position that was bereft of talent. But it didn’t feel like the Cards got quite enough despite having seven of the top 90 picks? Admittedly, third-round RB Trey Benson could pay off if incumbent starter James Conner gets banged up again … or gets too expensive. Third-round TE Tip Reiman of Illinois felt like a luxury ... and a cruel decision given he doesn't believe in birds but has to play for the Cards and constantly face the Seahawks.

21. New England Patriots (B-)

Though it must have been tempting to sell the No. 3 pick for the draft assets a fallen dynasty clearly needs, new director of scouting Eliot Wolf was probably wise to stay in the fairway and take North Carolina QB Drake Maye … and hope it all goes much better than the Mac Jones experience. And it should given the support the new regime should provide, not to mention the Jacoby Brissett Band-Aid option. An offense awash in WR2s took another in Washington WR2 Ja’Lynn Polk, Odunze’s understudy … though fourth-round WR Javon Baker of Central Florida could be a steal here. And the team is apparently hoping third-round OT Caedan Wallace, a right tackle exclusively at Penn State, can man the left side in front of Maye. Hmmm. Sixth-round QB Joe Milton III's arm will outshine Maye's, and his is no noodle.

22. Miami Dolphins (B-)

Taking Penn State pass rusher Chop Robinson in the first round was probably a good call given the injuries to veteran OLB Bradley Chubb (ACL) and Jaelan Phillips (Achilles) and fact a surplus of edge players is never a bad thing. Choosing OT Patrick Paul in Round 2 was a defensible hedge given the appearance that LT Terron Armstead seems to be coming to the end of the line – though Miami seems to remain quite vulnerable up the middle. Mid-round RB Jaylen Wright (Tennessee) and OLB Mohamed Kamara (Colorado State) could add bonus juice. Miami's third-rounder was forfeited due to owner Stephen Ross’ tampering violation, and the fourth-rounder was used in the acquisition of Chubb two years ago.

23. Las Vegas Raiders (B-)

A team that openly coveted a quarterback – or, at least, new HC Antonio Pierce did – had been frozen out of the market entirely by the time the 13th pick rolled around Thursday. Maybe they miscalculated, maybe first-year GM Tom Telesco played it conservatively as he tended to do with the Chargers. Regardless, the Silver and Black regrouped to get Bowers in Round 1 and Oregon OL Jackson Powers-Johnson in Round 2, both plug-and-play starters and likely impact players.

24. Tampa Bay Buccaneers (B-)

Like the Ravens, they keep winning … so they keep drafting late. But first-round OL Graham Barton (Duke) and second-round OLB Chris Braswell (Alabama) arrived at the intersection of need and value. Round 3 Washington WR Jalen McMillan could be the relative sleeper who delivers nicely.

25. Carolina Panthers (C)

One wants to like rookie GM Dan Morgan’s first draft despite the boom-or-bust element of it. But it was imperative to give second-year QB Bryce Young more weapons, and first-round WR Xavier Legette (South Carolina), despite his lack of production prior to 2023, and second-round RB Jonathon Brooks (Texas), despite his November ACL tear, should be. Eventually. Another Longhorn, fourth-round TE Ja’Tavion Sanders, should contribute immediately, though we'll see if third-round LB Trevin Wallace (Kentucky) is up to the task. The trade of Burns, basically for a second-rounder, still doesn’t sit right.

26. Jacksonville Jaguars (C)

Trading down in Round 1, for a pair of mid-round picks next year, and still getting LSU WR Brian Thomas Jr. is solid use of the board. Trading a Day 2 pick for WR Calvin Ridley, getting too cute in a bid to re-sign him, then having to take Thomas to replace him … not such good use. Third-round CB Jarrian Jones could be a heist, and it’s probably a win if one of the LSU DTs, Maason Smith (Round 2) and Jordan Jefferson (Round 4), hits.

27. New Orleans Saints (C)

First-round OT Taliese Fuaga (Oregon State) and second-round CB Kool-Aid McKinstry (Alabama) are good players at positions of need. Previous trades stripped the Saints of third- and fourth-rounders. And while a Round 5 spot spent on South Carolina QB Spencer Rattler isn’t hugely expensive, the team already had five quarterbacks on the roster if you also include Taysom Hill. Maybe Rattler’s a lottery ticket … and maybe a squad that seems to be falling behind in the NFC South should have prioritized other aspects of its depth chart.

28. Denver Broncos (C-)

The sins of the trade for former QB Russell Wilson have not only retarded this roster’s development but moving on from them boxed the Broncos in, at least partially, to taking Oregon QB Bo Nix at No. 12 – even if that’s tantamount to an overdraft. Giving Nix WR Troy Franklin, a Ducks teammate, in Round 4 could prove an efficient stroke. A fifth-rounder isn’t a huge investment in Notre Dame RB Audric Estimé, a highly productive player for the Irish … but how many ball carriers with 4.7 speed turn into reliable pros? No second-rounder as part of the price of prying HC Sean Payton from the Saints, something he’s presumably got plenty of time to justify.

29. Atlanta Falcons (D)

They did the expected by reinforcing the defense with a highly talented but not all that productive front seven player (Ruke Orhorhoro, Round 2) – when they could have had Newton – and a highly productive but not physically remarkable front seven player (Bralen Trice, Round 3). But, naturally, their draft will forever be regarded and defined by the shocking decision to select Washington QB Michael Penix Jr. with the No. 8 selection.

There’s no legit argument against opting for quality depth under center given the annual league-wide attrition at the position – Cousins a prime example of the issue in 2023. But this is a highly suspect way to resource it after signing him to a four-year, $180 million deal last month, when he said he looked forward to retiring in Atlanta. And that also cuts to the handling of the matter – if the Falcons’ brain trust knew they wanted Penix, there was little chance they wouldn’t get him at No. 8 … which suggests the right thing to do would have been to share the plan with Cousins much earlier than when the team went on the clock Thursday. Maybe this team has set up a seamless succession plan between an established passer and a highly compelling prospect. And maybe the well has been poisoned, and a team that should have been totally focused on loading up around Cousins made a royal miscalculation.

30. Tennessee Titans (D)

Not their fault that the Chargers took Alt two spots ahead of them, but could they have moved back and added assets rather than sticking and picking Alabama OT JC Latham? The risk is magnified by the decision to move him to second-year QB Will Levis' blind side – Latham played exclusively on the right side in Tuscaloosa – though if anyone is going to make it work, it's legendary O-line coach Bill Callahan. Second-round DT T’Vondre Sweat could be a reach personally and professionally – very possibly a limited two-down player who can’t get onto the field to affect games late.

31. Dallas Cowboys (D)

An organization that’s allegedly “all in” uses its first-rounder on a tackle (Oklahoma’s Tyler Guyton) with tremendous upside but who may or may not be ready to play immediately. And while Dallas needed help in the trenches (second-round DE Marshawn Kneeland, third-round G Cooper Beebe) and potentially filled a hole with third-round Notre Dame LB Marist Liufau, what’s the plan at tailback? Run it back with Ezekiel Elliott? All … in?

32. Cleveland Browns (D)

View the deal however you choose, but they’ve finally paid off their Watson debt ... though its aftermath continues to loom over the franchise from football, financial and fan-relation vantage points. The top picks they made – second-round DT Michael Hall Jr. (Ohio State) and third-round G Zak Zinter (Michigan) – don’t seem ready to contribute meaningfully in 2024, Zinter recovering from a major leg injury and parked behind established Pro Bowl guards (Joel Bitonio, Wyatt Teller) anyway.

Follow USA TODAY Sports' Nate Davis on X, formerly Twitter @ByNateDavis .

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Grading New York Giants' 2024 NFL Draft

How good of a haul did the New York Giants walk away with in the 2024 NFL Draft?

• Author: Brandon Olsen
• Publish date: Apr 28, 2024

In this story:

The New York Giants entered the 2024 NFL Draft with six picks and were one of the only teams to not make a trade throughout the draft. With those picks, they addressed premium positions of need and added depth to the back end of their roster.

Round 1, Pick 6: LSU WR Malik Nabers

At the beginning of the draft, three quarterbacks, one receiver, and one offensive lineman were drafted with the first five picks. 

That left the Giants with a decision to be the next team to reach for a quarterback or to take the best player available—they chose the latter.

Malik Nabers  was the fourth best player on our  Giants Country big board , as well as the second-ranked wide receiver in the draft behind the previously selected Marvin Harrison Jr. Nabers is immediately the most talented wide receiver on the Giants roster and should find himself as the top option for the duration of his rookie contract.

The Giants addressed a position of need while also grabbing the best player available: a massive win. Once again, Joe Schoen used his first draft pick on a premium position player. Grade: A+

Round 2, Pick 47: Minnesota S Tyler Nubin

The top safety in the draft is a New York Giant.  Tyler Nubin  has done it all at the college level and has the physical traits that should reasonably translate to the next level. This is one of the few times Schoen’s early pick was used on a non-premium position, but with the need on the roster and the importance in Shane Bowen’s defense, it was a necessity. Grade: A+

Round 3, Pick 70: Kentucky CB Andru Phillips

I wasn’t a big fan of the selection of  Andru Phillips  in the third round. I understand that he played a lot of Cover 3 and quarters at Kentucky, similar to what Giants defensive coordinator Shane Bowen called with the Tennessee Titans. What was missing from Kentucky was Cover 1, but just because someone hasn’t done something doesn’t mean they  can’t  do something.

My issue with the Phillips selection is that it feels redundant with Cor’Dale Flott on the roster and a more immediate need on the boundary. Unless the Giants feel that Flott or Phillips can play on the outside full-time, this is a depth pick in the third round. Grade: C-

Round 4, Pick 107: Penn State TE Theo Johnson

The  Giants Country  big board was very high on  Theo Johnson  despite his lack of production by college tight-end standards. The Penn State offense wasn’t favorable for any pass-catcher, especially for tight ends forced into pass protection. 

Given the question marks surrounding Darren Waller’s future with the organization, the Giants were bound to make a selection at tight end. They walked away with someone who should be able to contribute early as an athletic pass-catcher while he gets more accustomed to the NFL game, which is something to be happy about. Grade: B+

Round 5, Pick 166: Purdue RB Tyrone Tracy

My main hesitation with the selection of Tyron Tracy is that he’s already 24 years old and has just started playing running back after spending most of his career as a wide receiver. I think he has the skillset to contribute as a pass-catcher, but I wish the Giants brought in a more natural runner who is a proven contributor between the tackles here.

Tracy may become a great asset at this pick, but as it currently stands, I think the Giants need significant development in the running back room to have a good room. Grade: C+

Round 6, Pick 183: UCLA LB Darius Muasau

Darius Muasau is the kind of linebacker I envision as someone who won’t be a significant impact player on a down-to-down basis but could find his way onto the field rotationally and should play on special teams. Muasau played in a defensive system that was fairly similar at the linebacker spot to Bowen’s scheme, which immediately raises his floor.  Grade: C

Overall Grade

The Giants hit home runs with their first two picks and got great value with the Johnson pick in the fourth round, but they also made some uninspiring picks. Nailing the early picks matters more than a few average picks, so Giants fans should be happy with the draft's overall results. Grade: B+

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These Staten Island students have big ideas if they were to become president | In Class column

A pr. 30—IN CLASS — This feature is part of an ongoing education column highlighting the various activities that engage school communities.

STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. — Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-Staten Island/South Brooklyn) has announced the six Staten Island students who won the 2024 Presidents' Day Essay contest.

Elementary school students in grades 3-5 were invited to participate and write an essay about what they would do to improve their community if they were president of the United States.

"From securing our borders, keeping litter off our streets, to lowering the cost of prescription drugs, cutting taxes and increasing the number of police officers on duty, these Staten Island students effectively shared their thoughts on everyday problems impacting Americans," Malliotakis said. "It was a pleasure to meet with them and discuss their ideas, and it's my hope that this contest sparks a passion for positive change and civic engagement that continues to grow throughout their academic careers."

There were first- and second-place winners in each grade. The students each received a gift card to Barnes & Noble for their work, and were invited to attend a reception with the congresswoman to share their ideas.

Here are the winners, broken down by grade.

—1st Place:Celia Capobianco, Our Lady of Good Counsel

—2nd Place: Peyden Ajello, Our Lady of Good Counsel

—1st Place: Natalie Pasiuk, Our Lady of Good Counsel

—2nd Place: Vincent Spitalieri, PS 8

—1st Place: Christopher Bavaro, New Dorp Christian Academy

—2nd Place: James Ruiz, Staten Island Academy

WAGNER DANCE TEAM WINS BIG

The dance team at Susan E. Wagner High School, Sea View, recently won big during a national competition.

Hundreds of dance teams from across the United States gathered at the Hilton Orlando in Florida to compete at the National Dance Alliance National Competition. The event was held from March 8-10.

It marked Wagner's third visit to the annual competition. The school competed in preliminary rounds in several divisions: Varsity Hip Hop (medium group), Varsity Game Day (medium group) and Varsity Jazz (small group).

All three routines earned enough points to advance to the finals, which were held on March 10.

The jazz routine, choreographed to Billy Joel's "New York State of Mind," earned the team the seventh spot out of 39. The game day routine, choreographed to a medley of hits by Britney Spears, came in second out of 31 teams.

The huge win of the day was for the hip-hop performance, in which members of the team were declared the national champions in the division against 27 teams. The hip-hop team was also awarded the technical excellence trophy.

The Susan E. Wagner Dance Team was created in 2019 under the direction of coach Keri Minicozzi (nee Olsen), who also teaches dance performance at the high school. The 2023-2024 team was directed by Minicozzi and coach Allyson Acerra.

Dancers on the team include:

—Uendi Alliu

—Chloe DiGiacomo

—Karina Flynn

—Julianna Grippo

—Teresa Hionas (captain)

—Isabella Intorcia

—Nina Kinley

—Pamela Mazanillo

—Olivia Rendon

—Julia Rubino (captain)

—Emily Sabbatino

—Aza Villoda

—Arbiana Vukovic

—Vienna Wiseman

HEALTH FAIR

A health fair will be hosted on May 11 at PS 59 in New Brighton.

The fair, called The Passport to Health Wellness Fair, will be hosted by H.E.A.L.T.H for Youths. It is open to the public on Saturday, May 11, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. You can register for the event online.

Those with questions about the event can contact Heather Butts at [email protected] .

SEND US YOUR STORIES

Do you have a story idea for the In Class education column? Email education reporter Annalise Knudson at [email protected] .

Additional In Class columns

—Staten Island students participate in a global movement of kindness — In Class column

—Staten Island students participate in global 'Great Kindness Challenge' — In Class column

—Staten Island students given tour of major NYC infrastructure project — In Class column

—See inside new space-themed mindfulness room at PS 58 — In Class column

(c)2024 Staten Island Advance, N.Y. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

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2024 NFL Draft grades: Indianapolis Colts have good first two rounds as part of solid class

Overall indianapolis colts grade: b+.

This was a productive draft class for the Colts. They found the edge rusher they needed in Laiatu Latu and may have gotten a steal with the Adonai Mitchell pick in the second round. Depth along the offensive line was a need they filled as well and Anthony Gould in the fifth round may be a steal at wide receiver. If Anthony Richardson can stay healthy and build on what he accomplished as a rookie, the Colts might be able to actually get into the playoffs with the additions in this draft class.

Favorite pick: Adonai Mitchell, WR, Texas (52nd overall)

The Colts had Mitchell fall right into their lap after many people had him projected for the first round. Mitchell is a dynamic talent when the ball is in the air and should pair well with Michael Pittman Jr. at wide receiver. This is the kind of depth the Colts needed at wideout, where a bunch of young players are now competing for playing time.

Least favorite pick: Tanor Bortolini , C, Wisconsin (117th overall)

Bortolini is a talented athlete, but he’s very far away from being a reliable NFL offensive lineman due to his lack of strength. If he can get significantly stronger without losing speed, he can be a starter for the Colts. He’s not ready for that now. Going against Grover Stewart and DeForest Buckner in practice will put some hair on his chest.

Draft picks

Round 1, Pick 15: Laiatu Latu, Edge, UCLA Round 2, Pick 52: Adonai Mitchell, WR, Texas Round 3, Pick 79: Matt Goncalves , OT, Pittsburgh Round 4, Pick 117: Tanor Bortolini, C, Wisconsin Round 5, Pick 142: Anthony Gould, WR, Oregon State Round 5, Pick 151: Jaylon Carlies , S, Missouri Round 5, Pick 164: Jaylin Simpson , S, Auburn Round 6, Pick 201: Micah Abraham, CB, Marshall Round 7, Pick 234: Jonah Laulu, DT, Oklahoma

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