Can you get above a 4.0

Because we're getting closer to a 4. So as for your case, I can actually do this math for you—it's pretty simple. If you have a 3. X here is the GPA you need in junior year. That means you need at least a 3. So it would be possible for you to get a 3. It's not mathematically possible for you to get anything higher than that on a 4.

Now for the actual college advice—a 3. But make sure you have strong safeties as well, and aim for a diverse array of schools—not just big private universities like NYU. It's possible that it could round up to a 3. I think a 3. If you get a B it might bring your GPA down again so it's really hard to predict. Thank you for your answer!! Is there any way I can round it?

I have my full transcript of this year and I would love to know what it'll round up to :. Because my school has 4 quarters and 2 semesters, what does it calculate to? The final grades? It's each semester grade that goes toward GPA. You can improve from where you are, and you can have a lifetime of growth.

We've already covered how top colleges consider coursework one of the most important pieces of college applications. These schools expect you to take a challenging course load with some of the hardest courses offered at your school often AP or IB classes.

You'll also have to do this while balancing extracurriculars, test prep, a social life, and your own sanity. This means that your course load is going to be challenging, and your schedule will be demanding. It will take a serious amount of work to excel in every single class, and sometimes it will feel like you're just putting out new fires as fast as you can. I probably spent at least an average of four hours a day on homework including weekends on projects and studying.

This would increase dramatically when finals and AP exams came around. There's no way around this. The smartest kid at your school might seem to just breeze through life and get straight As without breaking a sweat.

If she enjoys having this reputation, she might even actively foster it. The reality, however, is likely that this "perfect student" is busting her ass every day. She might just hide it well or doesn't really treat it like work, and so doesn't seem to be breaking a sweat.

If you really enjoy learning, then working hard on schoolwork won't be nearly as painful. If you're used to a comfortable life and schedule with many hours of free time every day, you'll probably have to start making tradeoffs in other areas of your life. If you care about highly competitive college admissions, you will need to orient your life toward that. This usually means less personal relaxation or social time and cutting out an extracurricular that isn't adding to your application.

Again, I'm not saying you have to do this. Not every student should aim for top colleges and the most rigorous course load possible. But it's a meaningful goal and one that's important to a lot of you, so I'm just being real about what it takes.

It will take effective strategies to understand where to spend your limited time to get the maximum result. But the rewards are worth it, and if you learn these skills, you'll be stronger in the rest of your life.

We're going to talk about each of these aspects below. For pretty much all ambitious students, high school coursework is going to be a grind. I'm not saying that learning isn't fun, but inevitably you'll have to do assignments you don't care about, sit in class listening to profoundly dull teachers, and prepare for exams that aren't fun. All of this is going to take time and mental energy to drive through the most painful parts.

Having motivation makes a big difference in how hard you work and how strongly you persist through difficulty. It turns out that there are actually two types of motivation: extrinsic motivation coming from outside and intrinsic motivation coming from within. One of them is a lot more durable than the other.

A common source of extrinsic motivation is parental pressure. If you fail a test, you're grounded. If you don't clean up your room, you have your phone taken away. More positively, if you get an A, maybe your parents buy you that pair of shoes you always wanted. This can definitely work— but only in the short term and not reliably. While you might do your homework and stop texting for a night, ultimately it leads to frustration and resentment and won't be reliable for long periods of time.

Just remember the last time you argued with your parents about something they wanted you to do, like chores or homework. Fear of punishment can be an effective motivator, but it wears off, especially as you get older and more independent. Ground me, I don't care! If you rely on your parents to keep you motivated and your parents aren't around, you won't work.

In contrast, intrinsic motivation comes from within. It's something you want for yourself—screw what other people think. In the darkest of times, this motivation will drive you forward. When you're tired and would rather watch YouTube, the idea of getting a B will get you out of bed and keep you focused.

When you get a C on your essay, the idea of failure will be unacceptable and you'll have no choice but to question where you fell short and how you can improve in the future. Research shows that extrinsic motivation, such as rewards, are weak reinforcers in the short run and negative reinforcers in the long run.

Dig deep, find something internal you care about, and keep adding fuel to that fire. I want to caution here that you should try to steer away from unhealthy motivations if possible. I was very competitive in high school to the point of being repugnant, and my high school atmosphere overall was pretty toxic.

It's better if you can find something positive to encourage you that doesn't make you a jerk. There's more on intrinsic vs extrinsic motivation here , written for teachers. Up to this point, we've covered really high-level mindset and psychology. I know parts of this sound like hokey motivational speech, but trust me: way more students suffer from these problems than I would like.

Even though schools rarely cover these topics, I think they're the most critical of all. If you don't believe you have the capacity to improve, each failure will cripple you mentally. If you have nothing to drive you, your work every day will be painful.

You need a super solid foundation on which to build your actual learning and study habits. In order to get a 4. This section goes over how to plan out your study schedule so that you're on track to getting a 4. Let's start with the basics.

You need to know early on what classes you're going to take your four years in high school. This will help prepare you mentally for what's to come.

Once you make sure you have all the requirements in place, you'll be able to start gathering info on classes to come—and also be able to picture the story you're building for your college applications. Gear your expected course sequence toward your interests. You don't have to take every single hard class available.

Remember what Harvard's admissions office says: "[S]tudents should pursue the most demanding college-preparatory program available, consistent with each student's readiness for particular fields of study" bold emphasis mine. This is useful for colleges to understand what you lean toward. If you don't know what you're interested in, you can do a general spread of the usual courses. As I suggest in my guide to getting into Harvard , I recommend thinking about what you want your application story to be and deeply exploring specific interests rather than trying to be too well rounded.

Sorry to keep linking to my Harvard guide, but it contains my best admissions advice and resonates strongly with this guide! This also means that you don't have to play the same game as everyone else. You do not need to take exactly as many AP courses as the top student in your school does.

Are you a writer who really wants to showcase this talent in your college application? You don't have to take AP Biology. It might be really difficult and unenjoyable for you, and it will take up hundreds of hours that are far better spent elsewhere that will strengthen your application.

For my business, I interview and hire a lot of Ivy League graduates. Most often it's centered around their core interests. Don't feel pressured to do what your friends are doing or what's generally accepted as right. Finally, make sure you really understand all the prerequisites for each of the advanced courses and plan ahead.

You might have to take summer-school courses—understand how this works and anticipate any issues. A personal example: I wanted to take AP Biology my freshman year, which meant I had to take biology as a summer course after 8th grade.

This was unusual and I was only one of two freshmen to do this. The next year I wanted to take AP Chemistry as a sophomore, which required me to take chemistry in the summer. My high school only had two available classes for chemistry, and they prioritized older students. I didn't get the placement, which meant I had to register at a high school half an hour away and drive back and forth each day thanks, Dad.

Another benefit of planning early is that you can start gathering information on courses you'll be taking in future years. This will prepare you mentally for what's to come and let you structure your life accordingly, like having the right amount of extracurriculars so you can stay afloat. Different schools have different reputations for how courses are run. At my school, AP Biology was seen as a hazing boot camp, requiring hardcore memorization of tiny details.

In contrast, AP Physics was really laid-back, even though conceptually I think it's a lot more difficult. This might be the opposite at other schools. Being able to predict this will help you prepare your life in advance and make sure you know what you're getting into.

Also, different teachers have different reputations. One AP Biology teacher at my school was known for being excellent—he explained concepts clearly, was enthusiastic, and showed students the bigger picture.

The other teacher was unanimously considered one of the worst teachers at our school. I had the latter fun story on this later. Even though you might not have control over which teacher you get, you'll be able to gauge how much variation there will be in your future.

There is one limitation in every human's life, from Bill Gates' and Mark Zuckerberg's to yours and mine. It's the time you have per day. Everyone has only 24 hours in a day, and it's up to you to get the most out of each day. If you're aiming for a top college, building a strong application will likely take up almost all your free time. Roughly speaking, out of 24 hours in a weekday, you have eight hours for school and transit which are mandatory , eight hours for life outside of school, and eight hours for sleep.

And I do recommend you get sleep—more on that later. Of the eight hours you have outside of school, you might need four hours every day to get through your homework and another two for your extracurriculars. This gives you just two hours of free time. Weekends remove the eight hours of schooling but likely replace it with more studying, test prep, and extracurriculars. When charted like this, it's clear that you have a strictly limited amount of time every day to get through what you need to get through.

Furthermore, if you're able to save an hour every day, you'll be able to get an extra hours per year. This is a massive amount of time you can use to improve your grades or make serious progress on an extracurricular. They'll be strongly motivated to do well and often passionate about what they're doing.

Remember what we discussed regarding intrinsic motivation. This is a staggering amount. We'll talk more about time management below, but there are two high-level points I'd like to make now. Notice how at the very beginning, a little bit of effort makes a big impact on results.

After a while, each additional unit of effort barely moves the needle on output. Thus "diminishing marginal returns. A common time drain is social time or hanging out.

If you haven't seen your friends all day, then the first 10 minutes you see them are going to be super exciting. You'll share the latest news and gossip and find out more about each other's lives.

By the end of the first hour, though, you'll often run out of things to talk about. This is where awkward silences might start settling in and people start focusing on their phones. By the end of the third hour, you're probably in a zombie-like state in which you're hanging out but not really doing anything in particular.

You could have packed things up two and a half hours ago and spent the rest of that time doing something more effective. The same goes for texting, Snapchat, Netflix, and browsing the internet, as far as your happiness is concerned.

The first little bit goes a long way, but the rest of the time doesn't add all that much. The trap here is that all these activities are pretty pleasant and pain-free compared to running a marathon or studying. Like a warm blanket in winter, they're easy to get lost in and hard to escape from. It takes real discipline and willpower to break out of that trap and do hard things like study for a test.

Surprisingly, diminishing returns applies equally to classwork. There really is a point at which studying more isn't going to raise your score and you're just obsessing for no real reason. There's a point at which spending more time polishing an essay isn't going to get you a higher grade on it. If you're a perfectionist like I was, you might obsess over every last detail. You have to recognize when good enough is good enough, and extra units of time aren't actually adding to the quality of your work.

Surprisingly, a 4. This is really stressful and difficult. It's about doing a good enough job everywhere and getting the most for the least. With the concept of diminishing returns above in mind, you should examine where you're spending your time and question the value you get out of every extra half hour you spend on it. This really extends to all aspects of your life. Largely speaking, your life will be include school, homework, extracurriculars, test prep, social time, and family time.

Some of these will be really important to your college application, while others won't be. If a major goal of your high school life is to get into the best college you can, then you need to structure your life around maximizing your chance of success.

There are a couple of common time sinks that don't end up contributing to your college application as much as you think they do.

Time Sink 1: Time-consuming, ineffective extracurriculars. Typically, extracurriculars will take up the most time outside of coursework. Certain activities take up a ton of time but aren't very impressive to the top colleges if you're not performing at an elite level. I'd like to single out a few common ones:.

As you can see, the pattern is that it's easy to spend time on activities that are very common, very time-consuming, and very indistinguishable from what everyone else is doing. Time Sink 2: Hard classes you don't need to take. As I mentioned above, you really don't need to take AP Biology if it's especially hard for you. It's easy to get caught up in what everyone else is doing, but you don't have to play the same game. If you're participating in one of these activities, dropping it can free up hundreds of hours a year.

This is a massive amount of time. A clear exception to the rule above is if you really enjoy your activity. If you really really like volleyball but only play at junior-varsity level, then keep on doing it. Happiness is important, and it's usually better to be happy and un-optimized than miserable and optimized. In all other cases, it's just silly to do one of these activities at a mediocre level at the expense of schoolwork or other helpful things.

I know this analysis sounds pretty intense, but it's super important, and not enough students actually take a step back and evaluate why they're doing what they're doing. It's also a really good life skill—you're never going to have more time in the day, and when you get into college and your career, getting the most out of each hour will put you ahead of most people.

In high school, I spent time every day chatting online with friends and playing computer games. These were my ways of unwinding. However, I rarely ever let this "wasted" time expand beyond an hour per day, often because I gave it to myself as a reward after finishing all my homework. Remember diminishing marginal returns. My parents also were pretty effective moderators of this, sometimes disconnecting our internet at night so I wouldn't stay up til 2 am chatting about stupid stuff.

Again, the most important piece of advice I have in this section is to analyze everything you're doing and decide whether it's worth it. If you spend your time correctly, like what I suggest in my guide on getting into Harvard , this will put you far ahead of most of your classmates. For a sane life, you need to know precisely when major tests and papers are due, and when every homework assignment is due.

You then need to plan ahead and budget enough time for each assignment. You need to notice when you're ahead or behind in your schedule for each of your classes and adjust your time so you can catch up.

A Gantt chart , a common project management technique. More hardcore than you need, but used here for illustration. If you know you need a full week to write a good essay, plan for this.

Start a full week ahead of when it's due, and not any later. If you know you need 15 hours to study for an AP Biology test, budget the time for that every day.

I suggest using Google Calendar or the iCloud Calendar for this. You can color code categories of work like homework, projects, and tests. You can also set alerts for things you tend to forget. You want to be a machine and aim for full preparation for everything you're responsible for. You should treat any surprises or last-minute work as a failure of planning.

These increase your stress and lower the quality of your work. No last-minute homework crunch of quiz studying should be happening.

I know that all-nighters are, in rare cases, necessary, but they should not be a common occurrence. While it might be fun to bond with friends over pulling an all-nighter for a paper, take a step back and realize what that says: "I didn't plan well enough to budget enough time for this assignment, even though I've already done 20 of them. It was physically and mentally painful, and most likely lowered the quality of my work.

The better thing to do is to have that paper ready a whole day before it's due and have it so rock solid that you're sure it's going to get you an A. Again, since you're going to be spending at least hours per month on homework, you might as well spend an hour a month guiding where that time will be spent. Now, sleep. There seems to be an epidemic of high school students regularly sleeping very late at night—say, past midnight—and having to wake up at 7 am or earlier.

They then need to get triple shot espressos every few hours to make it through the day. It's universally accepted that teens should be getting eight to 10 hours of sleep every night. When I was in high school, I regularly slept from 11 pm to 7 am, without fail. I remember this clearly because in senior year, I had to stay up till 2 am working on a group English project that we'd all procrastinated on. This stood out to me because I'd rarely ever stayed up that late.

And yet, with eight hours of sleep every day, I was still able to pack everything in. Remember what I said above about being ruthless with effectively using your time. Worse, it affects you in an insidious way—you'll think more slowly and less creatively. Essentially, a vicious cycle happens: you fall asleep later, making you less efficient and making your homework take longer to do.

If you're not getting enough sleep, you need to examine where you're spending your time and be sure that every hour you're spending on something is really worth it. I would bet something does exist that you can cut out. There's probably some combination of an intense coursework schedule, a demanding school, and intense extracurriculars that make it extra hard to carve out more time. But I'm sure at least one of two things is happening:. I can also guess that something dumb is happening: sleeping late is now considered a badge of honor, especially at uber-competitive high schools.

If you're around hardworking students, people likely brag often about getting only four hours of sleep. Pounding Red Bulls visibly is something to be proud of. They might even be tempted to share this on Instagram, timed perfectly at 3 am. This is silly because it incentivizes the opposite of what you want—it rewards you for being inefficient, not efficient. In fact, people who do this probably waste time during the afternoon because they want to sleep late.

Sounds crazy, doesn't it? You should aim for the opposite—do really well and make it look easy. If people don't actually do this, I apologize as I'm an old man now and out of touch with you teens. Up to this point, we've discussed high-level strategy. This sounds like general life advice, which is appropriate given that since you're a student, school is a major part of your life. If you want to get a 4. I can't repeat enough that you need a solid foundation on top of which to build your studying and classwork.

If you don't have this, you'll end up like those unfortunate students who take on heavy course loads and flounder for years, getting five hours of sleep a night, feeling miserable, and not making it into their target schools. This is a recipe for academic discontent and disillusionment. It's like trying to build a house on quicksand. Instead, you want to build a fortress on bedrock. After reading this guide, take the time to review all the important notes and reflect on whether you feel like you're executing them well.

You might even do this every semester to make sure you're on track to your 4. With the high-level stuff covered, we'll now get into the thick of it: how to get straight As in your actual classes.

This section will cover general class strategies that apply to every single class you take, regardless of subject. Section 4 will then cover strategies for individual subjects like math and English.

At the beginning of the year, every teacher makes clear how the class will be graded. This varies tremendously from subject to subject and teacher to teacher, and it's important to understand where you should be spending your time to get the best results. Commonly, this means a distribution across homework and projects, test scores, and participation. Different teachers have different weightings. Often, science and math classes focus on tests, while English classes focus on essays and projects.

You need to prepare a strategy for each course to do well on whatever is maximized. A simple rule of thumb is that you should spend a proportional amount of time depending on how much it contributes to your grade.

In this case, you could get away with minimal class participation as long as you ace the tests and homework. Sometimes this can be deceiving—some teachers might give little weight to homework and more to tests, for example this is almost always the case in college courses.

But it's often difficult to do well on tests without the regular commitment to homework, so you should spend that time on homework even if it doesn't contribute to your grade. Curved scales are rare in high schools, likely because they lead to unwanted competition. But if your class is curved, you need to pay attention to where you're positioned in the class, rank-wise, and you need to give yourself extra wiggle room in case the curve on a test is particularly tough.

Learning is a mysterious process. You probably don't remember how you learned to walk or talk. When you memorize something, you can recall that fact some time later, even though you don't really know what is actually happening in your brain.

Even at the frontier of research, the nature of how we learn is still pretty mysterious. Regardless, there are still a couple of principles of learning that have been provably effective. To build a tree, first you need strong roots and a trunk—these are the foundational concepts of the subject.

Then, you build the branches and the leaves—these are the smaller details you're often tested on. If you don't have a trunk, you won't have anything for your branches to grow on.

So when you learn something, really focus on the fundamental core of what you're learning—the core that underlies all the little details. For an example from calculus, let's take the concept of derivatives.

On a test, you'll often get a function and be asked to find the derivative of it. Different functions behave in different ways; the derivative of 2 x 2 is 4 x , but the derivative of sin x is cos x. These often require memorization, and the details are the leaves of the tree. The trunk of the tree is the fundamental idea behind what a derivative is: when you take a derivative of a function, what you're doing is defining the rate of change along the function.

At any particular point, the rate of change is equal to the slope of the line tangent to the function at that point. Derivatives, one of the most important concepts of calculus. If you're nowhere near taking calculus, don't worry about the details just yet.

When you understand this trunk, then every derivative formula afterward makes intuitive sense. You'll be able to absorb new formulas —new branches and leaves—much more easily since you just add them to the trunk. But if you don't understand this trunk, you'll find yourself struggling to memorize the details piecemeal, as if you're making a shoddy quilt.

This is also true in the humanities. When you learn how to write an essay in English or history, look beyond just following the standard essay template given by your teacher. Here's what you need to understand:. Once you build this trunk, the details of how to do this with actual words and phrases will come naturally. If you don't build your trunk, you'll become frustrated with following someone else's instructions without knowing why.

When you learn something, really try to ask yourself what the root of what you're learning is. Once you identify this, the details will come more naturally to you. Many teachers don't teach this way, so it's up to you to do it yourself. When I visualize how knowledge works, I imagine a network of nodes connected to each other.

Each node is a unit of information—a math formula, a concept, or a historical fact. When two nodes are connected, I see them as related to each other. Two linked nodes might be the area of a circle and the perimeter of a circle, for example. How I visualize my knowledge: each circle is a concept or fact, and lines connect related concepts. Nodes that are weakly linked and not accessed often tend to be forgotten much more quickly. Intuitively, this makes sense: if a particular concept is related to other concepts, every time you recall one of the related concepts, you'll have a better chance of activating the related concepts.

This then cements all the concepts around. I know this is very abstract, so let's use an example. In US History, you'll learn about three core events: the Revolutionary War, the Civil War and slavery abolishment, and women's suffrage. The brute-force way to learn about these events is to memorize the facts and details for each event, as though each were in its own independent vacuum.

After all, you're likely taught and tested unit by unit, so this is the natural way to learn. These unifying themes help you see the patterns among these important events. When you learn about Abraham Lincoln, you can relate his achievements to those of George Washington, strengthening your understanding of both.

Now, these events are clearly tremendously different from each other, but defining contrasts is just as helpful. During the Revolutionary War and the fight for women's suffrage, the main instigators were those being subjugated—the colonists and women. In contrast, in the Civil War, the action was more strongly led by white men in the Union and less so by the slaves themselves. Defining these contrasts still develops a connection among the events, in turn leading to a stronger understanding of both.

It also helps you ask interesting questions about why these events differed from each other. You can see how altogether you're building this interconnected network of events. When you learn world history, you'll be able to fit the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the end of colonization, and other events into this framework. This rich, multi-dimensional network-building is a stark contrast to the usual way history is taught—as a one-dimensional timeline. The one-dimensional way was how I was taught history and it made history a pretty boring collection of historical facts, which is a shame because learning could be so much more interesting and effective.

If you can focus on building a strong trunk of knowledge and connecting what you learn to what you already know, you'll be able to learn much more effectively. If learning is your job, your teacher is your boss. Your responsibility is to follow the teacher's guidelines and give the teacher what she wants. Your performance will then determine whether you get a promotion an A or get fired an F.

This can be intimidating, but it doesn't have to be. Even though teachers might seem like imposing vanguards of knowledge, in reality they're humans, with ambitions and flaws like everyone else. By understanding how a teacher thinks, you'll be able to customize your approach to the class to increase your chances of performing well in it. This is especially important in subjective pieces such as essay grading, group projects, and class participation.

There's a huge variation in the types of teachers you'll have. Some teachers are veterans—they've seen it all and won't put up with your whining. Others are new—they're still trying to figure it out, really want to do a good job, and crave approval from students.

Some teachers are passionate, want to connect with students, and achieve carpe diem moments daily. Others are perfunctory and just want kids to keep quiet and cause less trouble in their lives so they can go home and watch The Walking Dead. Some teachers want lively class discussions and want to see students inspire each other. Others run class like a prison—no outbursts, or you get solitary.

The more you understand how a teacher thinks, the more you can give the teacher what she wants. This might sound sociopathic and calculating, but in reality it's a social skill you already use without thinking much about it.

It's also a skill you'll be using throughout your life, from college applications to job applications and work. They chose education as their craft for a reason, usually because they like the idea of inspiring students and contributing to their growth.

They also care about the subject matter—if they teach math, they find math interesting. If they teach history, they find history interesting. Grizzled veteran teachers might be disillusioned by this because maybe their kids have historically sucked, but they're still open to being surprised and inspired by the young people they teach. Most teachers hate students whose sole concern is getting a good grade and who make this desire clear from their questions and behavior.

Most teachers love students who sincerely care about the class material and show curiosity. They love passing on their subject matter knowledge to students, filling the jar of the student's mind. One place this is clear is in the syllabi that teachers write for classes.

You might not know that AP courses at every high school are audited by the College Board for curricular soundness, and teachers are required to submit their syllabi for approval. Here's a real example from a teacher for AP English Language:. This lesson plan is an X-ray into the thinking of the teacher; it clearly describes the meaningful skills students are expected to learn, and the teacher's enthusiasm is palpable.

While this is probably an example of an above-average teacher, it illustrates how teachers who care really do understand what they're teaching and what they want students to get out of it.

If you can prove to the teacher you're learning what she wants you to learn, you'll be in amazing shape. You are the future, so teachers want to see admirable qualities in their students. You'll be liked if you're honest, take responsibility for your mistakes, contribute positively to the class, and work hard.

You'll be disliked if you're sneaky or dishonest, disrupt the classroom, act arrogantly, or blame others for your mistakes. Teaching requires a huge time commitment. After school ends, teachers have to grade homework at night and plan for the next school day. Some of them supervise extracurriculars. This can mean an effective workday of 7 am to 6 pm. If, instead, you can offer ways to lighten the teacher's load and solve his problems, he'll love you.

Understanding how the teacher thinks is critical to getting good grades on assignments, tests, and participation. On a history test, does the teacher care more about the big picture or about reciting minute historical facts? In an English essay, does the teacher care about executing a standard template well, or about having a novel point of view? What skills and concepts does the teacher really want to see in this essay? If you approach your classes from the teacher's perspective, you'll be able to customize your work to what the teacher expects.

We'll talk more about this later. Another significant way this will improve your class performance is to communicate with the teacher more reliably.

Given the same issue, you can present it in a way that'll make the teacher hate you, or in a different way that'll make the teacher admire your maturity and resolve.

Use this chart and this guide to calculate your own GPA. For instance, if you are intending on pursuing a degree in Humanities, it would be better to take AP Language and Composition over a standard English course. Our free chancing engine takes into account your history, background, test scores, and extracurricular activities to show you your real chances of admission—and how to improve them. This is a way to improve your understanding and ultimately perform better on your assessments.

In the grand scheme of things, active participation in class will lead to greater retention of the material; which is crucial to getting prepared for college-level courses. Feedback is an important learning tool. Constructive feedback from your teachers or peers leads to revision and reflection that may prompt you to put aside or completely scrap previous work. While getting upset and even angry by feedback is a natural reaction — many of us are prone to getting defensive when we feel insulted — work on accepting and studying the feedback.

This will help you learn from it and improve your performance in your coursework. But if your ultimate goal is truly to achieve an unweighted 4. Just make sure these challenging courses are in areas that are strengths for you and complement your overall profile. Some high school students see their classmates as competition. So, try to work with, rather than against, your peers. This will help you approach problems in new ways, engage with diverse perspectives, and learn in a more positive and supportive environment.

They will be able to offer advice on how to do well in given courses, what various teachers are looking for, and could help with specific topics. Find out what strategies work best for you.