How to Quit Worrying About Your College Grades and Still Do Well

A little anxiety over your grades can be motivating, but too much stress can cause more harm than good. I was the first person in my family to go to college, so this is an issue I pretty much had to figure out on my own until I developed friendships with students older than me. I think that's what makes freshman year the toughest in that you haven't had a lot of time to get to know people yet. I'll try to give you the best general advice I can as far as what helped me and what kept my grades up.

1) Being prepared will lessen the anxiety.

I had to work my way through college, so I had to get creative when it came to studying and preparing for tests. What I ended up doing was reading chapter summaries just before a class, taking notes during lectures, and then later typing those same notes up when I went to study.

Hopefully before the test I had seen and heard the same set of information several times (which leads to actually learning it), and the typed notes serve as my own personal "cram" notes since they were a condensed version of everything needed to know for the tests.

2) Find out how your instructors grade.

Most of the time you'll find this out on your first day, and it helps you come up with a plan on where your focus should be. For example, I've had instructors based 30% of a final grade on a midterm and only 5% on class activities for the whole semester. Obviously it would be in my best interest if my time was limited to spend more time preparing on the mid-term, even in the situation where I may lose a point or two for not being as prepared for a class activity.

In other classes, it may be the reverse and better to focus on class activities to keep your grades stable if they're a big percentage.

3) Realize you don't have to be a "perfect" student to succeed in life.

Successful people fail more than the average person because they know it's a part of learning and a price you have to pay for success. If you let fear and anxiety control your life, you're limiting your own potential for all the wrong reasons.

What makes college very different from high school is that you're paying for it-either currently or later. Even if you earned scholarships, it was still earned. You need to look at college as an educational product-you've paid x amount of dollars for x amount of classes. You want to make the most of it as if you were paying admission as you were entering the classroom door. To get the most out of college, focus more on learning and not so much on grades since genuine learning will naturally raise your grade anyway in most cases.

Additional Tip:

• If an instructor is rude to you or has an ego-driven policy to fail a high percentage of students each semester no matter what they do, it's usually all right within a certain time frame to "fire" them and switch classes if that's where the pressure is mainly coming from. You just have to learn how to detect whether an instructor really cares and just wants to give you a challenge or if something else is going on.