You’ve just reached you fourth year in high school and it’s time to start looking at colleges and universities. However, your grades aren’t exactly Honour Roll level and you feel that pressure of the approaching deadline closing in. If your grades are low and you know that you don’t qualify for the school of your dreams, it’s time to throw in the towel, right? Wrong! This is actually the time that you should start vigorously working to turn things around and get those grades up! It’s going to take a lot of work and no one is going to tell you that it is going to be easy. But after everything is said and done, it will be very worthwhile once you receive that acceptance letter to your dream school! Here are a few ways you can start turning your grades around and make this the year that truly counts:

1 – Ask for more help

If there’s something you don’t understand, you need to ask for help. The teacher should be able to set aside some time to speak with you on the section in the curriculum that you’re having trouble with. Some people either feel too shy or unintelligent when they reach out, but the truth is, not everyone is good at every subject. It might take a few tries, but eventually you will get it as long as you make that step to consult an expert. Asking friends who are passionate about the subject for some help can go a long way as well.

2 – Take on extra credit assignments

This is where the extra work comes in. If you express a genuine interest in boosting your grades to your teacher, they should be able to provide some extra credit assignments that will help bring up your grade point average. It means putting in more work than you might be expecting, but it will be worth all the effort in the long-run.

3 – Adopt better organizational skills

It’s important to have your life fully organized before you start expecting better grades. This means a more well-organized workspace, note-taking skills, essay-writing skills, etc. Sometimes the issues with underperforming grades come from poor notes, so making sure your notes are effective so that your study material will actually help you get that grade you need. Being organized helps you keep track of your assignments, due dates, and test dates so you’ll never be taken by surprise.

4 – Know your learning style

Everyone takes in information differently. The visual style of learning has students relying on graphs and diagrams to understand concepts instead of solely taking in information from text. There are also physical learners who “learn by doing” and need to actually participate in a certain activity in order to understand lessons (for example, conducting science experiments). Additionally, there are aural learners (who learn through rhythm, often putting their study notes in the form of lyrics and song), verbal learners (students who rely on speech to learn, either by listening to another person describe the concept or by speaking themselves), logical learners (who learn by looking at systems and patterns in information), social learners (students who learn better through study groups and bouncing their ideas off of other people), and solitary learners (students who prefer to learn by themselves).

References:

https://www.learndash.com/7-major-learning-styles-which-one-is-you/

https://www.oxford-royale.co.uk/articles/improve-underperforming-grades.html