I have been tutoring biology, chemistry, organic chemistry, and physics for over a year and a half at Texas A&M and find myself repeating the same advice over and over to all my students. Most are pre-med or pre-vet students and need an A. I am pre-med myself and know all too well the anxiety and stress of GPR pressure. The expectation of perfection is a cumbersome burden to bear and a lot of students quit. It is something I hate to see, especially if your life’s dream is to go to professional school. I hope this guide helps some of you succeed and build better learning habits.

Know your limits

Most people say cramming doesn’t work. It does. I do it for most tests and it has worked pretty well for me. I do it because I know my limits and depending on the course it is perfectly possible to learn and retain an entire month’s class material in a day. However, I do not recommend this unless you can handle it. I procrastinate just like everyone else (probably worse than most), the problem is most people let it affect their grades. If you can’t handle cramming or last minute studying, obviously you shouldn’t keep doing it. Read the syllabus for every class and determine the work load and study time you should dedicate to each. You should spend days preparing for most exams, but study for a small amount of time each day, not all day long. In order to succeed as a student you need to be aware of your abilities and study accordingly.

Practice

If you practice the material sufficiently for a course you should barely even need to actually study for the exam. The only way to solve problems and learn processes is to actually work out a bunch of them, and by a bunch I mean all of them if that’s what it takes. I am lazy just like everyone else and struggle to pull myself away from fun things to do lame homework for some class I don’t even like. The thing is though, it doesn’t matter how you feel about it, if you want to go to professional school you need A’s. Practice everything a professor assigns or makes available. I am talking all practice tests, all extra homework assignments, problems out of the textbook, online resources. Just do it all. You shouldn’t stop practicing until you are getting 95% of all problems from any assignment correct. Exams test your mastery of material so you really do have to master it. How well you can answer questions should be indicative of exam performance, unless you are practicing way too easy of problems (try your best to understand your professors’ expectations, I usually just prepare for the worst). Extra practice will not only help you learn and remember how to do things, it also increases how fast you can work through problems.

Understand why/how

Most students look at a metabolic pathway or an equation and they see that something happens. Equations and graphs are used to illustrate scientific concepts. Instead of memorizing the thing itself, understand why the thing happens or why it is the specific way it is. What causes a reaction mechanism to work the way it does? What are the physical forces at play to cause such a phenomenon? The only way to apply the information you have learned is to actually understand all the inner workings and details of it. Don’t focus on the professor telling you what happens, focus on understanding why and how it happens. Don’t literally do this out loud, but as you work through a problem or question kind of ask yourself “why?” as you go through the steps you take. The point is to basically prove to yourself that you know the answer by understanding exactly why you are right. By doing this you will make more associations between concepts in your course, greatly expanding your ability to both utilize and recall information. A history teacher once told me to think of knowledge as a web; the more intersections you make, the stronger the web.

Prioritize

If being a doctor or a lawyer or anything else is really important to you, act like it. If your grades matter for your career then make school a top priority because it is whether you like it or not. It sounds simple but people can be flaky. If you get stuck or frustrated, do something about it, don’t give up or quit. Failure shouldn’t even be an option for you if you are actually serious about your goals.

Success is attainable

There are classes out there where no one gets to have an A. 99% of classes aren’t like that though. Usually a normal class (at least at A&M) has about a 15-20% population of A’s per class. Some classes are even higher, up to 30 or 40% A’s. The point is is that most of the time an A is perfectly possible and most professors will give you all the tools you need to succeed. I refuse to believe I am ever just too stupid or dumb to succeed in a class, especially when plenty of students are able to succeed. If other people can make it work, you can too.

Do it yourself

I understand working alone can be boring but you will never learn anything better than actually looking it up and learning it yourself. Whenever I get stuck I look things up in the textbook, Google it, or what have you. Taking the time to figure out and discover how a certain type of problem is solved all by yourself is the best way to build a deep understanding of whatever you are studying. This sort of plays into the “know why” thing again. It also forces you to spend just a little bit of time really thinking about your studies, the more time you spend working the better you’ll recall stuff.

Work backwards

Whenever you are stuck on a homework problem, the first thing you should do is look up the correct answer to your question (if possible). Once you know the answer to a certain problem you can work backwards and try to understand what it is you should have done. For instance, if you were close to the answer and got it wrong or got stuck you can use the answer to rework the problem and figure out your mistake. You could also use the answer to guess several different methods of solving a problem and see which one works if you were really lost and didn’t know where to start. The idea is you know the answer so try and figure out why it’s right.

Use wrong answers

Wrong answers and mistakes are the most useful learning tool at your disposal. Getting things wrong tells you what you don’t know, which is pretty useful when it comes to preparing for a test. You should always take graded assignments and figure out not only what the correct answer was supposed to be, but also why it was the correct answer and how you got it wrong. Doing this with old quizzes, tests, or homework assignments will help you close the gap between what you do and don’t know.

There are no shortcuts

There are no shortcuts. One can dream though.

When all else fails, get help!

When you get stuck and try to work backwards or look things up, sometimes you will still come up short. When you have truly tried your best to figure it out on your own and are still lost, go ask someone for help ASAP. Someone who understands a concept you don’t should be able to translate the problem so that you can understand it too. It is a little less common with professors but peers and TA’s can usually explain things in a way that will make sense to you. I only recommend figuring things out on your own more than seeking help immediately because you will recall information significantly better independently, proving it to yourself rather than being told what’s right.

Study something you like

Everyone, no matter what their major is, will take classes that they don’t like or aren’t interested in. Those you just have to suck it up and work through. However, you should choose a major of study you find intriguing and interesting. Being passionate and interested in science will make you want to learn more about science. You would be surprised how much easier classes are when you are truly engaged and provoked by the material you are learning.

Everyone is different

I gave a lot of advice here. However, just because this stuff works for me and some of my students does not mean it will guaranteed work for you. It depends on your learning abilities, the professor, and what kind of class it is whether you should utilize some, all, or none of my advice. Use your best judgement, you’re an adult.

If you go to Texas A&M you can get FREE, one-on-one tutoring by going to http://tutor.tamu.edu/ or using the other tutoring services and supplemental instruction provided to you FOR FREE from A&M. Don’t pay money for a tutoring service if it is not necessary.