6 Common Mistakes That Top Students Don’t Make
So let’s start with something controversial. Grades are not everything but they do matter.
Higher grades increase your range of options of 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 if you have the option, get higher grades and avoiding these 6 mistakes can help you do just that.
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.
What are these common mistakes – well, let’s jump right in.
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, that sleep is really valuable in consolidating information.
Have you ever had the 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 demonstrated 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 the sleep between 10-12 is the most valuable.
2) The relationship was really clear. According to the authors of the study
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 tended to remember the first and last.
German scientist Herman Ebbinghaus (of Forgetting Curve fame) described this as the Primacy Effect and the 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.
Studying in Groups
Avoiding group studying may seem like heresy to an MBA 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.
At the end of it all, they think they’ve put in many hours of studying when in reality very little productive work has been done. 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.
Trying to multitask
Sorry, it’s just not a thing. We’ve had a couple of decades of students and knowledge workers trying to convince themselves they could multitask effectively. In fact, all they were doing was rapidly switching between tasks, and exacting a cognitive price while doing so.
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 and don’t even try, especially those students who don’t seem to be working very hard to get high grades.
Failing to make use of practice exams
Top students rarely make this mistake.
First off they use them. An Australian education company surveyed 10,000+ students and found that you could almost perfectly predict a students’ score by how many practice questions they do.
So first off – use practice questions.
I 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.
One other subtlety that can matter. I’ve seen people do the practice exam, with a coffee, casually checking their textbook and notes, taking frequent breaks.
Practice tests are great because they can simulate exam conditions and time pressure. Try to make your practice exams as realistic as possible.
Beyond that, top students use the results to diagnose where they’re weak and need to review.
Using Ineffective Study Techniques
One of the most important mistakes top students don’t make is 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 in their favor is simply overwhelming.
This is going to be a key topic we’ll be discussing so I’ll leave it there for the moment.
Hopefully you’ll be able to benefit from this to avoid some of these mistakes, score higher grades and maybe save some time in the process.
