Tuesday, August 23, 2016

The four secrets to proven academic success

I've been teaching for over 10 years now. Recently I started giving a presentation to new students revealing my four secrets for academic success.

All students are keen to find the "secret sauce", but then realize that they actually knew these "secrets" all along.


  1. Come to class - Yes this is pretty obvious but the strongest correlation to good grades is attendance. And of course once in class you should actually pay attention rather than spend the entire time on social media.
  2. Do the work - And this is not just doing the work you think is required, but actually reading the description of the assignment and doing what has been asked for. If the assignment asked you to compare two B2B companies, don't compare two B2C companies.
  3. Hand in the work - As Wayne Gretzky said, "You miss 100% of the shots you don't take". You are better off handing in what you may feel is a substandard piece of work and getting some marks than handing in work that you regard as perfection  so late you get nothing. And once you get the work back read the instructor's comments. They have taken the time to read your work and give you some feedback. Take a few minutes and read it over.
  4. Don't plagiarize - A bit obvious. But I've lost count of number of times I've seen students who opt to take what they regard as the the easy route and copy part or all of their project from the web. But it does not go unnoticed. The plagiarized work stands out as if the handwriting had changed.
Students that do these four things pass their courses. For anyone who has been teaching for a while these tips are pretty obvious, but it appears that many in the latest generation of students didn't "get the memo".

Labels: , , ,

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]

<< Home