 What's happening? It's Shane here. And in today's video, we're going to be talking about how to get good grades in college and high school with the least amount of time and effort. Okay, so today's video is not going to be about how to be a Rhodes Scholar or how to get a 4.0 and just be the perfect student ever. I wasn't the perfect student ever. So it wouldn't make sense for me to make a video about that. However, what I can confidently say that I am very good at is doing well in school without spending all that much time or effort on studies. During college, I had about a 3.6 GPA. I did undergrad as well as a doctoral program. And during all that time, I worked and I did lots of extracurricular activities and I maintained a life, right? I was able to actually enjoy my college experience. I think most people want to actually enjoy their college experience, have a life, date around, etc. So there was one point where I had probably about five different positions. I was the president of the class. I was vice president of one organization, treasurer of a different organization, fundraising chair of a different organization, liaison on a different one. Wow, that's a lot. And on top of that, I was working and as you could probably guess, I've always been doing side hustles and kind of been trying to start businesses here and there as well. So I think I speak for most people, you just want to get the most out of your studying with the least amount of time and effort. And that's what this video is going to be all about. And we're going to get right into it right after you gently tap the like button. Let's set the goal for this video 1000 likes and also hit that subscribe button. Only about 17% of you are subscribed. And I think out of the 17% of you that are subscribed, only about 8% of you have hit the notification bell and turned on all notifications. So what are you waiting for? Go ahead, do it. It helps the channel out a lot. And I appreciate it. All right. So first of all, the first thing I want to mention is when I was on my journey of learning how to study and kind of like learning how to learn really, there was one author who I found to be extremely helpful. And his name is Cal Newport. There were two books in particular that I read that I thought were fantastic on how to become a straight A student and how to win at college. If you were only just going to read one of them for college, I would say read how to win at college. And if you were only just going to read one of them for high school, I would say how to become a straight A student would be a fantastic choice. But really, you should read both of them. They're very short, very easy to read. Now, some of the stuff he recommended in the book didn't work for me specifically, but a lot of the stuff he recommended was absolutely life changing. It was fantastic. So some of the professors that you have in college are going to be the types that basically just read off of the slide. And going to class is essentially just a waste of time. Other professors are going to be on the opposite side of the spectrum, where they're extremely helpful. They actually teach you things during class, like you actually learn a lot during class and they're very engaging. And then most professors are going to be kind of in the middle where, you know, they kind of read off the slide a little bit. But at the same time, they tend to emphasize what's going to be on the test. And notice how I did that. I kind of leaned in and I stopped what I was saying and I said emphasized. And that's kind of important. You want to go to class and get kind of good at reading body language, right? So it might sound kind of difficult, but a lot of the time professors are going to emphasize things, right? They might repeat it several times. They might slow down when they're saying it. It might be on bold, you know, on the slide, professors have their different ways of doing it. But most of them will make it very clear what's going to be on the test. And your first few weeks of class, your job is to figure out what type of professor they are. Are they somebody who it's worth it for you to go to the lectures? Or are they wasting your time? Now you got to be careful with this second step, because let's be honest, all human beings are kind of lazy at our core. And if you let yourself go, you're probably going to make excuses in your head of why you shouldn't go to class. But realistically, you have to be objective about this and decide, is this class worth it for me to go to? Or is it not? Now sometimes classes are going to have like mandatory assignments and stuff. And in that case, you got to go to class one way or another. But then you can decide, should I actually pay attention while I'm in class? Or should I kind of like work on other stuff? Because at the end of the day, your time is your most valuable resource. It's very limited. And if somebody else is going to waste your time, which a lot of professors do, unfortunately, then you want to just not even go to class. Now, number three is going to be something that is absolutely life changing. This, when I started doing this, this was like a night and day, it saved me so much time. So right after class, every day, right after you've taken your notes, and it's still fresh in your mind, what you want to do is you want to go over your notes. Now you either wrote the notes down, or maybe it's on a PowerPoint or something like that. And you kind of like made notes under the PowerPoint, but you want to go over those notes right after class. And what you want to do is you want to think in your head, how would I write these questions if I was a professor? How would I test people to see if they're understanding the concept and the material if I was a professor? And you honestly want to get really into character, you know, you want to be like an actor here and pretend like you are an evil professor, okay? You want to be as hard as possible on yourself. And then you want to make, I would say, at least 10 questions per day, at least 10 questions per day, every single lecture of questions that you think are going to be on the test. Now over the semester, this is going to pile up. And by the end of the semester, it's probably going to be 200 to 300 questions. And let's be honest, most finals are not going to be 200 to 300 questions. And so you are going to get a significant amount of the questions that they would have put on the test right away. And what I found doing this is my tests were way, way harder than whatever the professor was doing. Now what I would personally do, I would, it's very simple, I would take a piece of paper, I would write Q on the top and then whatever class it is. So Q biology, right? And then I would write a on the other piece of paper, and write biology as well. Okay, so question and answer on the question paper, I would word the questions in such a way where they were usually either blank, right? So whatever the definition of something was, and then I would have blanks there, so that I had to actively recall it, it wasn't just like, is ABCD, right, sort of thing, it was like an I have to actively recall it, if I don't remember it, I don't remember it sort of thing. And this is much more powerful than being able to answer questions in the ABCD format. So for instance, I might ask the question, what are the essential amino acids? And then I would have to actively recall the names from the top of my head. And then another question might be, what are the branched chain amino acids? Okay, that'd be valine, isoleucine and leucine. And I'd also have to actively recall that from the top of my head. It's very important that you don't look at the answer until you have the answer. And then what I would do is I would actually go over the questions every single day. And I would mark down the ones that I get wrong. And I would go over the ones that I got wrong a second time. And this actually would not take very long at all, right? So even if you went over 300 questions, usually by the time you get to the end of the semester, you have most of them down. And you don't even need to go over like most of them at all, you just go over the ones that you have gotten wrong before. Usually after writing down the questions, this exercise would maybe take me maximum one hour per day to go over all the questions and all of my different classes. Now it's a little bit different if you're taking mathematics classes, because that's very conceptual. It's not very like memory dependent. I of course was like a pre health major. So I was taking a lot of science classes. And I had to memorize a lot of stuff. If you're doing a math class, the best thing for you to do is just do as many problems as you possibly can. You can still use this method if you think there might be some like multiple choice questions on the test or some types of questions they're going to answer. But the best thing for you to possibly do is just do as many tests and as many questions as you possibly can. What exactly do I mean by this? What you want to do is whenever you are taking a particular class, you want to look on websites and other resources and find old tests from that professor for that exact class. Okay, so some resources would be my edu, really good website, ratemyprofessor.com, chaig is really good, different fraternities, sororities, scholarship halls, sometimes libraries will have these as well, or just ask around to other students in the classroom, because a lot of time people will, you know, have them and they'll just send them to you. But what you want to do is you want to start your studying with the test questions themselves, right? So actual test questions that the professor has made in the past. 99% of professors will either straight up reuse their test questions, or they will just replace a few things here and there and then essentially ask the same exact question on the same concepts. Okay, professors, especially ones at universities are very busy. A lot of the time they spend much more time doing research than they do actually teaching. And so usually they are relatively lazy as well. And they're basically just going to rewrite the last year's questions. So basically what you want to do is especially right before a big test, look at the test questions, look at the old tests, see if you understand it right away. If you do great, if you don't figure out where that concept is in either the slides they did, the notes you have or the book, figure out that concept, go to the book, learn the concept. Sometimes you don't even have to go to the book. Sometimes you just look it up online on Google and then also try to understand other ways that they could ask the question. Okay, this is a much smarter way, in my opinion, than just studying like all the chapters that they assigned, because usually 80% of the stuff they assigned is not going to be on the test. And I have to admit, and I don't necessarily recommend doing this. But once you get really good at the last two things, you know, the making your own tests, and then, you know, studying old tests, there are many tests where I didn't even open the book. Go over all the material from way back in the semester, look at all the question and answers you made all your, you know, your own tests, go over everything at least once. And the way I like doing this, especially like right before a final, is you're basically just trying to, you know, have it as a refresher in your head. Chances are, if you've been doing the other two methods that I said, you're going to be good to go. But if you really want to ace a test, you should do this. And the best way to do it is to basically go over all the material, and then anything you think might be on the test, make sure to write it down. Now for me, writing it down is very important. For other people, they like to, you know, make voice recordings, if you're like an auditory learner, there's many different ways to do it. But for me, writing it down has been the best possible way for me to retain information. So what I like to do is I basically just take a notebook, like a piece of paper, and anything that I think I might have a little bit of trouble remembering, what I'll do is I'll take the concept and I will reword it in my own words. Okay, very important that you don't just write down exactly what it says in the book, you have to reword it in your own words. And then you write that down on the piece of paper. And if you don't get the whole thing right, that's totally fine. Flip the piece of paper upside down and write it again right below where you were before. The reason you want to flip it upside down is so you can't subconsciously read what you were writing before, because it's upside down. I mean, unless you can read upside down, then I mean, that's pretty impressive. Shout out to my dyslexics, but you write it over and over again until you get it right. And again, this is another form of active recall. You know, especially if you're taking the test in a few hours or the next day, and it's an ABCD style test, which most tests are, it's a multiple choice style test. This form of active recall, you're going to remember the answer doing this, you're going to remember it. What I mean by that is at the very beginning of the semester, you really want to do well on the first few tests. And there's a few reasons for this. First of all, you want to gauge how difficult the tests are, right? So if you take the first test and the second test, and they're super easy, chances are the rest of the tests are going to be easy as well. If you take the first test and the second test, and they're super difficult, but you still did well because you studied really hard, then you know that you kind of need to pace yourself a certain way, right? So you'll prioritize your time and you'll study more for that class. Now, one thing you can do is look on websites like ratemyprofessor.com and figure out whether, you know, the professor's really difficult or not. I would always do that during college. And it's, it just helped me out a lot because once in a while, you're going to run into a professor that just makes the class needlessly difficult. It's like a three credit class, but it feels like nine credits. They must think that their class is like the center of the universe or something. And, you know, you spend 40 hours a week on their class alone, just totally ridiculous. And you want to avoid professors like that. So yeah, ratemyprofessor, fantastic resource for that. And then what you want to do is after you've started strong, you know, you've gotten an A on the first two tests, you can kind of gauge how difficult the rest of the semester is going to be, right? So you can pretty much coast the rest of the semester if it's an easy class. And then maybe at the very end, you try really hard on the final, but if it's a really hard class, you know, you need to prioritize and try really hard on every single test. But most of the time, I would say 80% of classes after you've ace the first two tests, you can pretty much coast for most of the rest of the semester. And then you can try really hard on the final. So start strong, finish strong. And this is especially useful if you are writing papers, okay? So anything that requires writing a paper, some level of creativity, the 80-20 principle comes in clutch. And this includes making videos, by the way. And basically what that means is 20% of the effort gets you 80% of the results. So I remember at one point during my life, I would try to make papers absolutely perfect and I would take like 10 hours to write one paper. And then I would do the calculation at the end of the semester and I would realize like, this paper was like 0.05% of my total grade. And I spent 10 hours on it. That absolutely just does not make any sense. I mean, listen, it's important to do the paper. Don't get me wrong. But I shouldn't be spending 10 hours on something that's 0.05% of my grade. And so what I started doing is on things like that where it's kind of one of those things where you just have to do it. But, you know, it's going to take you a long time if you try to make it perfect. I would literally just set a timer for like two hours and I would say at the end of these two hours, I'm done with the paper. And yes, a lot of the time I would get like a B on the paper instead of an A. But I would be pleasantly surprised. I'm like, I didn't spend that much effort on this paper. I didn't spend much time and I didn't put that much effort into this paper. Yet I still got like an 87%. And when you set a clock like that when you set a timer, it almost feels like you're racing against time, right? Like it's mission impossible or something like that. And it makes you get really creative and try really hard. And it's also a lot of fun. Now, at the end of the two hours, once in a while, I would like mess around with it a little bit, like just make sure the spelling's good and all that sort of thing. So I would spend a little bit more time on it. But for the most part, I was pretty much done after two hours. And this works really well with projects as well. If you ever have to make some kind of like board that has pictures on it and stuff like that works really well with presentations, too. There's just so many ways that you can apply the 80-20 principle. And Parkinson's law is work expands as to fill the time available for its completion. And what does that mean basically? That means that if you give somebody two hours to do a job, they're going to get the job done in two hours. But if you give somebody 10 hours to get the job done, it's going to take them 10 hours to do it. And same thing goes for studying and studying for tests, et cetera. So this is slightly different than the 80-20 principle. But this one more applies to studying in general, and specifically studying for tests. So what I would do is, you know, if I had an hour between classes, I would set a timer for 20 minutes, kind of similar to the Pomodoro technique, if you've ever heard of that, but I would set a timer for about 20 minutes. And I would say, I'm going to study for this class for exactly 20 minutes. Usually I would just go over the questions, right? So the tests that I made, the question and answer sheet, and I would try to fit as much learning as possible into those 20 minutes. And I'm telling you, if I just said I'm going to study for this class, I would sit there for two hours, I would kind of study, kind of not study, I'd be checking my phone, I'd be doing all kinds of crazy stuff. And I would probably get about the same amount done in those two hours as if I said I only have 20 minutes to study. Again, it just gets the adrenaline pumping, you feel like you're racing against the clock and you learn really fast and efficiently this way. This is something that I personally did, you don't have to do this, but every single semester, I would choose a class that was my B class, right? So I would be like, okay, I'm totally fine if I end up getting a B in this class. And usually this would be the most difficult class, but not always. Sometimes it was just a class that I wasn't super interested in, and I just didn't want to really study all that hard for it. But yeah, I would be totally okay getting a B in that class. And this would help me not only kind of like clear up a lot of time, but also it was just kind of a psychological sort of thing where I just wasn't putting a crazy amount of pressure on myself to get all A's because there was a time like early on in college where I tried to get all A's. And then I got my first B. And after that, I was just like, I'm not even going to try for all A's because I feel like you just put a ton of pressure on yourself when you try to do that. Whereas when you're like, eh, I'm okay with a B in this class. It's just a psychological thing where there's just not nearly as much pressure on you. But funny enough, I still ended up getting all A's sometimes. I would be close enough in that one class where I'd just be like, you know what, I'm going to try really hard on the final and get an A. But again, that was my choice. It wasn't something that I had to do. So that's all I have for you today. Hope some of these tips helped you out. Let me know your best study tips down in the comments below. Check out my other videos right here. I made them just for you. Go ahead gently tap the like button, hit the subscribe button and ring the notification bell and I will see you next time.