Welcome to the GradeMate Blog!^™

Deciding what courses you should register for is almost as stressful as working through the courses themselves. You could be signing yourself up for an easy A or a semester of hard work and tough grading. Through my collegiate experiences as a student and my work as an educator I have picked up a few tips for choosing the courses that will fit you best.

Get Requirements Out Of The Way. No matter what major, minor, or certificate you are working towards you are going to have required courses. Most programs have courses set in a particular order that you can’t really stray from but there are usually a few choices that you can make. The natural tendency is to put off harder courses or ones with a teacher you do not like. My advice it to get required courses done early. No one wants their last semester of senior year to be the toughest. Bite the bullet and do the things you have to do as soon as possible. This will allow you to do the things you want to later on.

Study What You Are Interested In. When choosing classes you should look for the classes that you have an interest in. That may sound like common sense but you would be surprised how many people end up in courses they heard were easy over courses that actually interest them. Even if one course is much more work than another, as long as you are interested in the material you will have more motivation to do the work. When someone chooses a course based on how easy it is to get a good grade their only motivation is getting that grade. When you choose a course based on interest you are more likely to learn and retain information because your motivation is to understand the material.

Find Professors That You Like. As soon as you step foot on campus for your first semester you should start looking for professors that you really click with. This could be someone who is entertaining during class, is very knowledgeable about the things you are interested in, has the same kind of personality as you, is a role model for you, or for any reason you really like. If you can find a professor that you want to listen to for any of those reasons you will look forward to class, put more effort into course work because you don’t want to disappoint him or her, think more about the material on your own, and learn more about the subject. It doesn’t matter whether this professor teaches something in your major or they teach a course that you won’t get any credit for. If you find a professor that you like and you can some how take their class, do it. You will learn more than in any other class and you will enjoy it much more.

Critically Consider Other People’s Advice. This may sound hypocritical because this post is intended to be advice, but you should carefully consider anything that someone else tells you. If you are interested in the material for a course and like the professor but your friend says not to take it because its hard and not fun you must carefully consider the situation. Not everyone is interested in the same material as you and not everyone likes the same professors as you. Maybe your friend got a bad grade on a test and holds it against the professor, that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t take the course. You will never know what a class is like until you take it but you must be a bit skeptical about what other people tell you.

Make The Best Of What You Have. No matter what you do you will probably end up with a professor or class that you don’t really enjoy. If you get upset about it and spend all your time complaining you will be miserable, you won’t learn anything, and you’ll probably get a bad grade. Some times you just have to buckle down and work your way through a tough course. If you try to have a positive attitude about things they will be easier to get though. It may be tough but learning isn’t meant to come easy.

Hopefully you found some of this advice useful. I know creating your schedule can sometimes be a nightmare but as long as you try to keep a positive outlook you’ll never have it too bad. Good Luck!

Taking notes during class is an important part of any course. Whether the instructor writes everything down on the board or does no writing at all, you should be jotting down notes as you go. A lot of times we take notes that really don’t explain anything. Just about everyone has gone to their notebook to study for a test and found that the notes they took are disjoint or just don’t help to explain the material. Many times you understand something during class and jot down a quick note but by the time you go back to study you forget the details.

Split page note taking is a technique that allows you to take two different sets of notes for the same information. It is incredibly simple to do and can yield incredible results. The basic idea is to take a normal sheet of paper that you would take notes on and split it with a vertical line. Some people split the page in half where others leave a space no bigger than the margin on the page. Each person determines how they want to split the page based on their experience using the system.

On the right side of the vertical line you take notes just as you normally would. In math and science classes you would work through problems on this side as well. The left side of the vertical line is for you to comment on the notes you just took. Here are some examples of what the left side of the page can be used for:

• Clarify remarks and summaries of the notes
• Comments indicating important points
• Explanation of how a problem was done step by step
• Questions about things that are unclear as reminders to ask the teacher or do more to clarify
• Rewording of notes the teacher gave that may not be clear

Say your instructor writes down a word and gives you a specific definition they would like you to remember. This will go on the right side of the page. On the left side of the page, just next to this definition, you should write a definition in your own words or an example that helps to make sense of the definition.

If you are working through a complicated math or science problem you can work through the steps on the right side of the line and the explanation of each step or where numbers came from can go on the left side. This helps you to not only follow the math and formulas used in a complicated problem but to understand why they were used as well.

Split page note taking really allows you to personalize your notes and make your notebook more efficient. The amount of space on every page of the notebook that is saved for special notes will most likely be more beneficial to you than the original notes. Many people have a very difficult time taking good notes but practicing this technique will eventually lead you to better note taking.