6 Common Mistakes That Top Students Don’t Make
Read time 6 mins
Today we’re going to be talking about higher grades, specifically common mistakes people make that make it harder to get higher grades.
Let’s start out with a little bit of a spicy🌶️ take.
Grades are not everything but they do matter.
Higher grades increase the range of options for roles you can apply for, including some of the super competitive jobs.
Beyond that, if one part of your profile isn’t as strong, then you might be able to lean on having higher grades to get you consideration.
The bottom line is that higher grades are better so it’s worth a little effort to get them.
Avoiding these 6 mistakes can help you do just that (the last one is my favourite).
I don’t need to tell you that time is at a premium. Avoiding these mistakes will also help you have the time to job search, socialize and have some downtime. 🌴
Unfortunately, so many people struggle because, well, they’re called common mistakes for a reason. Most people have never been told to avoid them.
So what are these common mistakes – well, let’s jump right in.
1. Not getting enough sleep
This is definitely not a secret but it might as well be.
Top students make sure to get their sleep because they’ve been convinced either through personal experience or the scientific evidence (and there’s lots of it), that sleep is critical in consolidating information.
Have you ever had an experience where you’re trying to figure something out, and it’s just not clicking? Then you go to sleep, and it all seems to come together in the morning?
Sleep appears to play an important role in both declarative (fact-based information) and procedural (how do I perform that action) learning.
MIT conducted an interesting study which found a strong relationship between sleep and grades. Two other interesting points also emerged.
1) It’s important to get to bed before a threshold time, regardless of total sleep time to avoid a performance penalty. In most cases, it was getting to bed before 2am. I’ve seen other studies suggesting that sleep between 10-12 PM is the most valuable.
2) The relationship was really clear. According to the authors of the study, “…there was essentially a straight-line relationship between the average amount of sleep a student got and their grades”.
The author went on to say, “The fact that there was a correlation between sleep and performance wasn’t surprising, but the extent of it was.”
2. Trying to Study Too Long
This might seem like an odd addition to a list of study mistakes. We’re supposed to study a lot, right?
Sort of.
You’ve probably seen someone do a demonstration where they tell someone a long list of numbers and that people tend to remember the first and last.
German scientist Herman Ebbinghaus called this the Primacy Effect and Recency Effect.
So instead of studying in long non-stop sessions, break them up to create more firsts and lasts, taking short breaks between sessions. Bonus points if you do push-ups or run up and down stairs during the breaks to get your heart pumping.
Besides avoiding uninterrupted study sessions, top students also have another trick.
They decide at the beginning of each session what they plan to complete.
This little trick helps the brain stay engaged since “the end is in sight” as opposed to an endless study session.
3. Studying in Groups
Avoiding group studying may seem like heresy to an B-School student but think about all those people you’ve seen on the main floor of the library.
They’re at the big tables “studying” all together. They talk, glance at their books, check their phone, glance at their books, get some food, glance at their books.
They think they’ve spent hours studying when the reality is they did little actual work.
Exam results come in and they are baffled as to why they didn’t score higher.
Top students find quiet areas to study by themselves or with just a couple of people.
And when it’s time to study, they study.
4. Trying to multitask
We’ve had a couple of decades of students and knowledge workers trying to convince themselves they could multitask effectively. In fact, all they did was rapidly switch between tasks
And this exacts a cognitive price.
Dr. Sophie Leroy introduced the idea of attention residue when we switch between tasks.
“Attention residue easily occurs when we leave tasks unfinished, when we get interrupted, or when we anticipate that once we have a chance to get to the unfinished or pending work, we will have to rush to get it done. Our brain finds it hard to let go of these tasks, and instead keeps them active in the back of our mind, even when are trying to focus on and perform other tasks.”
Top students, at some level, understand attention residue and the cognitive costs associated with multi-tasking.
These are the folks who don’t seem to be working very hard to get high grades.
When they’re working, all their attention is on the task at hand so they can get it done faster and more effectively.
5. Failing to make use of practice exams
They use them to practice for exams and use them effectively.
An Australian education company surveyed 10,000+ students and found that you could almost perfectly predict a student’s score by how many practice questions they do.
I also saw an Emory University study which showed a meaningful improvement in results among students who used the practice questions that were offered to them, whether they received feedback on them or not. That shouldn’t surprise you at this point.
Incredibly though, nearly a third of the students didn’t bother to use the practice questions. Talk about giving up a free lunch!
So make sure you are using practice exams.
Taking it to the next level
There are a couple of other subtleties that take this to the next level.
I’ve seen people do the practice exam with a coffee, casually checking their textbook and notes, and taking frequent breaks.
These are not exactly test-taking conditions.
Practice tests are great because they can simulate exam conditions and time pressure, but that only works if you treat them like that.
The other mistake I’ve seen is students will take a practice exam, evaluate it and conclude, “Well, that’s what I would have gotten on the exam.”
That may be true but it wastes a huge part of the value of practice exams.
Top students use the results to diagnose what they don’t know.
Then they go back and learn it.
That’s one of the biggest values in practice exams, figuring out your weaknesses so you can fix them.
6. Using Ineffective Study Techniques
Many people still use passive learning strategies like re-reading and highlighting as their primary study techniques and then wonder why they’re not scoring very high grades.
They may even get good results but have spent insane amounts of time to do so.
Top students use techniques like active recall, spaced repetition and the Feynman technique to learn more in less time. They do this because the evidence is simply overwhelming. It’s not even close.
This is going to be a key topic we’ll be discussing so I’ll leave it there for the moment.
Closing thoughts
I hope you’re able to avoid these mistakes and crush your grades in less time. Be sure to check out some of my related articles below..
