Getting A’s was not high on my to-do list. To this day I don’t believe getting good grades in college is as important as getting good grades in high school. High school, for most people these days, is about getting ready for college. You cannot do that if you do not apply yourself to your studies. College, on the other hand, is about getting ready for life. Unless you have your heart set on med school or law school or some other form of grad-school trauma, your extracurricular activities in college are often more important than your courses.
But getting A’s is better than getting B’s, B’s are better than C’s, and so on. For those who want to get the best grades they can in the time they have allotted for study, a new book, “Professors’ Guide to Getting Good Grades in College,” provides wonderfully useful and easily digestible wisdom.
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If you want to find out more about our book, go to http://www.professorsguide.com There you can read sample content, advance reviews, and also submit your own tips about getting good grades in college.
One of the tips offered is to find the professor’s old exams, eg., using the files maintained by fraternities or sororities.
Everyone knows that having old exams is useful if only to see how the professor approaches the subject. Better yet, if you’re really lucky, like the users of the old exam network in West’s calculus class several years back, you’d actually have a copy of the exam the teacher was going to give you since he recycled old exams in whole or part. (If you had a big enough exam file, you’d have most of the test if he was quilting one together.)
Of course teachers should be writing fresh tests. That’s their job, to evaluate students and to do so fairly. Grades are supposed to measure mastery of the material, not how well-connected someone is.
The solution? Professors should at least offer all students a sample exam. This is pretty standard practice in law school–old exam files are kept in the library accessible to all.