so you want to become the perfect student that student it girl student Pinterest student the one that always gets trainees effortlessly and at this point you probably know what you need to do study more be organized use the Pomodoro method test yourself make engaging notes but nothing ever sticks you try your new study habits and routines for like two days then crash and ultimately keep being the same old chaotic hot mess Express version of yourself while those other perfect that students in your grade keep acing their exams without seeming to break a sweat but no more in this video I will go over all of my top secret non-basic study tips and hacks that actually work and will help you finally see improvements in your grades based on my experience of ranking number two in a class of 500 plus people in high school having Straight A's all throughout middle school high school and now college and getting into three ivy league universities so here are three main issues that I've personally faced and I feel like the majority of students face when it comes to studying and grades one you don't know how to study two you don't study enough or three you don't study efficiently so for potential problem number one this is just the situation where you don't yet know the strategies and techniques that work for you and help you get top grades so here are the general rules for playing the game of getting good grades first it's really important to note the weighting of the assignments and how important the exams are in order to prioritize your time on the assignments or exams that are worth the most and making sure that you put most of your effort into that two is knowing what's on the exams obviously you won't know exactly what's on the exams beforehand usually but essentially knowing if the majority of the exam will be based on the lectures on the textbook or on both also after you get the feedback for your first few assignments or exam try to remember what the exam was like and whether it was more from the lectures or textbooks and just overall analyze the exam in the first couple of assignments and try to figure out what what the teacher wants also if you have quizzes in your class then I recommend trying to write down any questions you remember after the quizzes and seeing if they pop up on the exam later a lot of teachers reuse questions from quizzes I've seen this a lot with my classes and that way you can get free points because the same questions popped up on both the quizzes and the exam lastly again if there is any access to past exams or past papers or practice questions in a textbook it's great to use them to review and see where your knowledge gaps are and also again see if any of the questions end up popping up on the exams next if there is a study guide for the class I just straight up use that I don't really take notes anywhere else since if the teacher made a study guide or their own notes for the class it's very unlikely that they'll deviate a lot from the study guide and it gives you a great structured format to know what to study and what to prioritize so I'll quickly give two examples from this exact semester that I'm taking right now so for the Neuroscience class it had a study guide so I just made a Quizlet matching the guide and I copy and pasted from the textbook when I could so I didn't have to manually type everything and so I was going based off of the textbook but if there were parts of the study guide that were clearly just from the lecture then I would watch that portion of the lecture and take the notes from the lecture for that part and I still got a 96 on the exam even though I didn't sit and watch all of the lectures the same thing for my abnormal psychology class which I got a hundred percent on the exam so the professor said beforehand and also in the syllabus that all of the questions are from the textbook so I haven't watched any of the lectures yet I just hand wrote the entire three chapters of the textbook and then just reread them a couple times before the exam so a major thing here is once you find something that works for you even if everyone on the internet says handwriting is terrible and passive reading is bad honestly if it works for you just keep doing it don't let anyone shame your weird study methods or your inefficient study methods just find something that works for you and that helps you get the grades that you want okay so problem number two is if you don't study enough or have enough time so in this case I highly recommend cutting some extra Killers if you just realize you have way too many which I have had experienced in the past also I recommend tracking your time for a week or two and just seeing where all your time goes and also tracking how much time you actually study because for instance if it turns out you only study like five hours a week then you probably know that's something you need to work on is gradually building up how much time you can sit at your desk and study also a major tip that really helped me in high school when I had a million extracurriculars and a million classes is using your time in school wisely if you actually set that as a goal to use every free minute that you can in school to study it turns out that there sometimes is actually a lot of free time that just kind of floats around so use your time wisely at school if you can and you'll find that you have a lot more time for studying than you expected during the day in school and problem number three is that you don't study efficiently the most important thing to remember here is that the hours that you spend studying does not equal success something that I do to really save a lot of time is that sometimes I do assignments without even doing the weekly readings or the lectures I know that I sound horrible right now but I will literally read the assignment and then I'll find the part of the textbook or the chapter or the lecture that is supposed to be for the assignment and then I will do the assignment going off of the textbook already that portion that's supposed to be for the assignment because honestly when it comes to studying efficiently you do not have to handwrite your notes for everything you do not have to read every single sentence of every single chapter or listen to every single lecture and take 500 notes on them honestly I don't do that for every single class and every single lecture in every single chapter and I can still get A's just by reading through the parts that I need to and yeah it really is just about playing the game that is getting straight A's and figuring out what is the bare minimum sometimes that you need to do to get those days another thing that's top suit and Sue is that they definitely use outside resources that help them be more efficient and also study better so for example I definitely use Quizlet all the time I will sometimes use other people's study sets I'll find the ones that were made for my specific class for my specific University and then instead of making my own Quizlet I'll just go off of theirs and also if you look up certain teacher websites either your own teacher website or you can type in like a generic class like AP Chemistry Weebly online website you can usually find a ton of free notes PDFs documents that teachers have uploaded to their websites and actually use those as your notes instead of making them yourself so definitely don't be afraid of using the internet to research and find amazing resources another one of my ultimate secrets are hacks for getting those Straight A's and being the perfect student is grammarly the sponsor of today's video so I first downloaded grammarly a little over three years ago and I have never looked back since and as a college senior majoring in Psychology I have to write a lot of papers and essays and consequently I tend to miss a lot of minor errors that I make such as the time I accidentally misspelled a researcher's last name for half the essay but thankfully grammarly caught that mistake since it's an AI powered writing tool that is easy to use and will help you with your writing from brainstorming to even citations and I know that AI is everywhere now but trust me grammarly's AI really upped the game and makes it even more useful than before you can access gremlin's AI features by clicking grammarly's logo and when you're stuck with starting your paper and have writer's block grammarly can even help you kick off things with ideas outlines and tips grammarly also can help you paraphrase and rewrite instantly making it super easy to polish and fine-tune your essay before submitting it for grading grammarly also helps you show when you use generative AI to maintain transparency in your work making it easy to credit your use of AI and so grammarly is free to use and try out and grammarly is a must-have for all students sign up and download for free using my link and if you want to get access to extra features get 20 off grammarly premium with the same link of course if you're really struggling with a specific topic absolutely reach out to a tutor absolutely see because usually most universities and schools have free tutoring so try to see if you can find any student Tutors or free tutors absolutely reach out to upperclassmen if you can and definitely use your teacher as well as a resource especially if they're a really nice teacher go to their office hours visit them at lunch if you can and definitely use them as well okay so now let's talk about the mindset of a successful that perfect it's a girl student thing blah blah okay so basically when it comes to the mindset in my opinion there are three main pillars of this and number one is the confidence pillar which is basically the belief that you can improve because if you don't believe it you're honestly deep deep deep down going to just think I could be doing something fun instead of studying and sitting here and it's not going to make a difference so the way in my opinion that you develop this confidence or this belief that studying does lead to better grades or that changing the way you study will lead to better grades it only comes from results honestly I understand some people swear by affirmations and all that and if that works for you good for you but in my experience for instance with math and science which I really struggled with for the longest time and I didn't believe that I could ever get good grades in them is that you have to basically treat it as an experiment and be like okay I'm gonna really try to improve and learn this subject and just see if I can really really try for like a semester for instance and then once you actually see tangible results then you'll start to develop that confidence that you can change and it's that belief that you can do it that will keep you resilient and motivated and determined throughout the semester and not have a mental breakdown every time you don't get the results you want or you get a bad grade and that ties into pillar number two which is the growth mindset but it's basically that mindset that every failure is something to learn from and shows you what doesn't work rather than internalizing that failure and basically concluding that you suck and again in my opinion you'll only deeply believe that failure is not the end of the world once it actually comes true and you actually learn from failures and you actually bounce back and that's why pivoting or changing study techniques if nothing is working for you is super important so you don't keep doing the same thing over and over again and setting yourself up for failure so for instance if handwriting notes it's just too slow or too boring for you and you can't concentrate then definitely try watching videos or making flashcards or mind maps or something completely different and see if that works for you and the mindset basically is just even if I figure out how to study a year from now and it takes a year of failures and trying different methods and nothing working it's better that I eventually figure it out in a year then just continuing to do the same thing that I did for the past several years and continuing to get bad grades and the last pillar is simply placing importance on grades so obviously making grades a priority is important for getting good grades because if you don't care about grades if you don't think it's important then you're just not going to prioritize it you're not going to study a lot and you're not going to get good grades so I highly recom men trying to figure out why you want to get good grades and just really thinking about it and it's probably not going to come to you in like three seconds it might take several months even but just really thinking like why are the grades important to you is it for your parents do you want to make them proud do you want to get a good job in the future are you obsessed with a certain subject and you really want to learn it and be amazing and it really doesn't matter ultimately what that reason is you don't have to tell anyone but the stronger your emotions are about that reason the better because ultimately when you're sleep deprived when you're tired it's remembering that reason that will help you continue pushing through instead of going on your phone or giving up or not caring alright so part four is playing to your strengths and weaknesses and it's just basically trying to know yourself and how you work so for example I know that I have this thing where basically like I really get an adrenaline rush right before exams or deadlines and I work 30 times more efficiently the day of a deadline or right before an exam and that if I start studying a week before I'll be a lot less efficient than if I start studying three days before the exam am I saying to cram not at all it's still great to at least have the Quizlet ready or the study guide filled out before the exam but I do know that basically I will anyways be way more efficient a couple days before the exam versus like a month before the exam that's how I work I know that maybe that doesn't sound like the best advice in the world again I'm not saying to try to just straight up study everything the day of the exam that's pretty much impossible but I do know that I tend to work a lot faster more efficient before deadlines than I do a month before deadlines that's kind of how my brain works and I try to use that to my advantage also I know that I work a lot more efficiently when I see a Finish Line versus when I feel like a project is enormous and never ending which is why I like to break up my assignments or my classes or the things that I have to do into little chunks and then I know that I'll have a break after I do a certain amount of things so if you get overwhelmed a lot I also recommend breaking up tasks into little pieces and just not looking at the rest of your to-do list and only looking at like the next three things then taking a break then putting the next three things on the list then taking a break and last but not least is surrounding yourself with an artificial Community or a real life community of peers who are also interested in studying this is just really helpful when you feel like you completely don't care about studying or school or you're just really lacking motivation it can be really helpful to find maybe like five to ten people on YouTube on Instagram it can also be like Hermione Granger Rory Gilmore whoever you see as an academic inspiration and watching them in your free time to kind of remind yourself to kind of glorify the process of studying and that way I'm getting motivated inspired to study even on my breaks instead of getting completely distracted by a fantasy book or some really intriguing murder mystery show or something like that that completely distracts my brain from studying and from school so basically use your study breaks in your Pomodoro sessions or between study sessions to watch study people or study Inspirations to kind of help Focus your brain on studying and basically pretend that you are Rory Gilmore or Hermione Granger while you're studying [Music] foreign [Music]