The worst part of the whole thing is that when school is too easy for someone at first, it is very easy to get out of study habits and grades can suffer.

You should devote at least 2 hours for homework and study for each hour of classroom lecture. Any less, and your grades could suffer.

One thing that really helps with more difficult classes is to prepare for exams BEFORE the exam by making study notes. For each paragraph you read from the study materials, write down the main points in as small of a manner as possible, not more than two short sentences, one sentence if possible.

If you do this all year long, then when exam time comes, you can spend all your study time re-reading these notes, instead of chapters of text.

For History, try first to make “time-lines” on a poster board, so that you can visually see what event or what person came in what order. After you have that down, then concentrate more on dates (if your professor requires them to be memorized).

Also, home-made flash cards really work well. You can take index cards and put a date on one side, a name or event on the other side. Shuffle them and go through them on one side, then shuffle them and go through them the other side.

I had a hard time going from High School where I barely payed attention and got A’s to College where that didn’t work anymore! The best thing for me, was learning how to take good notes. I have to go to class, or else I won’t understand just from reading the book. I don’t write down every single word the professor says. I pick out the key points and make notes about them that I can remember…like the king who was beheaded by his people or something like that! I find it easier to remember if you put it in terms that you would use if you were describing the situation to another person. Hope this helps

I continue to find great success with flash cards. But I don’t do the ordinary paper ones. Instead I create my own powerpoint slides, where I write a question on one slide such as “What is a raid election?”, and then on the next slide the answer would be “An election where employees want representation from another union, or an outside union seeks members from a company’s union”. In this manner the answer is completely hidden from view when I’m asking myself the question, forcing me to think about what the answer would be on the next slide.

Also play some soft classical music in the background, piano music being the best. It really does work in that it keeps your brain from being distracted from any outside noises without the music interfering with your studies. Plus it’s much better (at least IMO) then having absolute dead silence, in which it’s always easy to get distracted.

I always study in the evening too after I do my daily workout and eat dinner, that way nothing else is holding me back in the day and that way studying is the last thing I do before I go to sleep.

Good luck with your studying.

I found the university easier than the cc, but my advice is to treat history courses like a series of stories. Sometimes, if you do a little extra research and find out why things happened, it actually makes it easier than if you just tried to memorize a string of facts. Also, for history classes especially, I would go to class, listen carefully and take notes, but would hold reading assignments until closer to exam time and use those to refresh my memory. When I held to that pattern, I never really had to “study.” But use that method at your own risk, of course.