Having at least a few hours of sleep between all that shit you studied and your test will get better results than pulling an all nighter to study like 4 more hours. First of all, your brain sucks balls at information storage and retrieval when you’re exhausted. And second of all, sleep is when your brain organizes all the new info you picked up, so you will actually remember more of what you studied after you’ve slept.
For high school: your body will really want to go to sleep at 2 am every morning, but don’t. Go to bed at a regular time. You might not like it at night, but in the morning your body will love you.
For college: Don’t cheat. It might be super tempting, but if you’re caught even once, the consequences are so much worse than in high school. Plus you’re setting yourself up for failure in the future. Do you really wanna be the guy who cheated their way through college only to end up with functionally zero experience in a real-world scenario where you have to apply what the job thought you learned? Hell, most jobs will probably see right through you and deny you on the spot.
Also whatever your brilliant-ass cheating scheme is, your TA has probably seen it 27 times already.
Also that thing where you go mess up the headers in an empty or irrelevant file and pretend your homework got corrupted to buy yourself an extra day was invented pretty much at the same time as electronic homework submission.
Join study groups, and when others ask questions, explain the answers as best you can in your own words.
This was key in study retention.
Don’t buy the textbooks. You probably don’t need them. If you do, buy a used one from another student for 1/100th of the price or get an online copy.
Also your mileage will vary depending on the book/edition, but a lot of times a “new edition” of a textbook is just a transparent cash grab by the publisher and is 99% the same material with different page numbers, so it’s worth asking the prof/a TA if the previous edition is pretty much the same. You can generally get “outdated” editions of a textbook for startlingly little money. Like I’m talking sub-$5 for a book that’s $140 new sometimes.
When I was a TA for a gigantic intro class they’d just released a new edition of the book we used but they’d only sent us two desk copies (publishers send free copies to professors who teach out of their textbooks), and the class was run by a professor and three TAs, so the TAs all had to share one copy of the new edition and taught out of the old edition 90% of the time. They’d only changed one chapter, so the professor scanned that one chapter to PDF and we handed it out to anyone with the old edition.
We also had, for some reason, like five boxes of the old edition under a desk in the department office and gave them out to anyone who would take them. You can hardly give old editions of textbooks away.
Not ethical: If you have to submit assignments (like .docx files) online and you haven’t finished it in time, take a random .docx file and edit it in a text editor (like notepad) and add/delete some random stuff. You can send this file and the professor won’t be able to open it so you will get an extension by default.
Just ask for an extension. Professors have seen this “trick” a thousand times and know exactly what you’re doing. They will respect you more and give you more leeway in the future if you’re straight with them.
