‘A level’ and university education come at a time when the student is perhaps the least prepared for the challenges coming with age and context of development. Training is often slow and prone to be one sided and expectations are often high and probably without good measure of empathy. Performance anxiety creeps in and it is often noticed that many a student will find themselves in depression, drug addiction and maladaptive behavior whose end result might be the ruin of a promising life. It is therefore reasonable to consider the student’s life as that of a warrior in a battle field trying to make do against severe odds in the form of:

• Academic challenges,
• Personal quality management,
• Need for strategic organization, and
• Tactical realities

Threatening to throw the student off and claim victory over yet another potential person who could reach self-knowledge and attain high qualifications for a professional and communal life. This article seeks to find how to get good grades in school and at the same time balance all other threats to achieve the biggest price of self-knowledge and temporal excellence.

Academic Challenges and How to get Good Grades at School

The challenge of how to get good grades at school is most salient when we consider the normal academic challenges faced in student life. We are normally in our mid to late teens when we first join for our A – levels and university education, and in most cases the psychological and social challenges may make us baulk when faced by the academic rigors required of us. Our desire for internal peace and cogency may appear to be of the first priority and the demands that we should also have aspirations for good grades may be pushed to a second order of prioritization instead of the first. This happens especially when we consider that there constraints to some of the basic resources we rely on for our school work like attention, thought and time, performance – action, and creation of realities. It may not be totally outlandish therefore to ask ourselves how to get good grades and not study. It’s important for us to understand what we mean by ‘not studying’. The main definition in mind is that of ‘the devotion of time and attention to gaining knowledge of an academic subject, especially by means of books’.

A Case for Not Studying Some Subjects

Some of the subjects/courses we take in school may accord to our natural tendencies and preferences that getting acquainted with lectures and engaging in mental experimentation and testing may be enough to keep us on the level of earning good grades without necessarily breaking sweat on books.

Besides, it is possible that some courses may be uncritical for the attainment of set objectives and that one needs to maintain a minimum threshold of grades while scoring high grades on other more critical and time consuming units.

Therefore, it is possible that one may make the rational decision to reduce study in some units and subjects with the aim of scoring good grades.

Using Personal Quality Management for How to Get Good Grades at University

The matter of how to get good grades at university or how to get good grades at a level doesn’t depend entirely on how to handle academic issues. There’s also need for controlling and directing personal resources and qualities to support the bid for how to get good grades at school. Personal qualities are determined by:

• The quality and pre-occupation of thought
• Conditioning management
• Personal association
• Physical fitness

Quality and Pre-Occupation of Thought

We exhibit how to get good grades at school when we can control the inhibitions of the mind through practice. The human mind is often restless and discursive, and will be preoccupied by stimuli that resonate with it in a random fashion. If one doesn’t get hold of the mind then it is likely that they will be in dire straits as there’ll scarcely be any moment of pure concentration.

It is therefore advisable for us to learn to train the mind against its default nature by practicing to be still. Given that the main aims of study involve self-actualization and optimal community and productivity it follows that the best form of practice for instilling stillness of mind is the practice of yoga.

The practice of yoga need not be sophisticated in the beginning. We only need to practice the ‘Kriya’ variety of yoga where we become conscious of the operations of our minds across a broad spectrum of positions called ‘asanas’. Using the guidance of a good manual or a qualified trainer we get to see the contents of our minds and the fears and the desires that drive them. These fears and desires are unsurprisingly among the most critical factors that prevent us from how to get good grades in school.

Conditioning Management

Even though there hasn’t been a broad consensus on the computational theory of mind, it can be shown that humans use computational schemes to determine the exact thoughts that will engage them and the objects that they’ll be focused upon. Melanie Klein and later Eric Berne have shown how we develop scripts that determine how we behave in various contexts and the probable outcomes of these scripts.

The main idea is that we often get what we program our minds to get. That is, if we can program our minds appropriately, it may be possible for us to negotiate how to get good grades and not study! The mind can be shown to operate on a model that involves subconscious and unconscious thought and computation. Therefore if we can enable and program our minds to compute clearly on any tasks given then we can be certain that our inputs will generate consistent outputs. What we need to be clear about are the specificity of mind commands and preciseness in defining when to start and stop an activity.

For example, we can command our minds to pay keen attention and resolve a question while listening to a lecture and if we are still enough during the period of attention as defined by our ‘start’ and ‘stop’ descriptions then it is inevitable that our minds will return results consistent with our desires. Therefore our quest for how to get good grades at university can be greatly met by understanding the computational qualities of the mind and effecting conducive strategies that will ensure our minds operate clearly and precisely.

Using Personal Association for How to Get Good Grades and Not Study

A critical factor in knowing how to get grades and not study is by keeping associations that provide you with direct outputs of other student’s personal study. By being a member of student groups with selected characteristics like interest in how to get good grades at a level one can be subject to discussions and may be able to augment other student’s thoughts in a way that would render study redundant. Remember that the option not to study is selected on the basis of having other subjects or units requiring greater attention than others and seeking to balance the overall performance to a certain required standard.

This implies that the diligent student can group the students to associate with along interest in studies and performance and find complimentary groups that he/she can associate with for mutual benefit. For example, a student may be strong in certain units and choose to associate with students displaying weakness in the same subject and who invest more time to study the subject. By availing his/her natural aptitudes to the group, our student may be able to save his/her resources accordingly and find that he/she may implement how to get good grades in school efficiently.

The Role of Physical Fitness in How to Get Good Grades at School

We also go a great length in how to get good grades at school by ensuring that we exercise regularly, eat a well-balanced diet, and get enough sleep and rest regularly. The human body is one complex system that is in constant intercommunication, and when our muscles and organs are not activated well enough then we may find that the whole system responds by lowering its energy levels accordingly. Lack of sufficient oxygen and blood supply through the body system causes laxity and sometimes may be the occasion of disease and impairment. For example, weakness along the spine occasions poor posture and imbalance leading to distortion in weight distribution. This in turn occasions joint pains and causes poor concentration. Low concentration in school work then translates to poor grades and may end up causing depression.

Lack of a balanced diet in our meals may also cause great impedance to how to get good grades and not study. Since the body is an energy system, failure to supply it with sufficient and durable energy and by not assisting the body system in cellular regeneration the brain system may lag and fail to register perception accordingly. Yet, we rely on perception as the basic input for how to get good grades at university.

Similar arguments may be advanced when it comes to lack of adequate rest. One can’t concentrate sufficiently when the body is harassed and bio-rhythms are disregarded. It is difficult to imagine how to get good grades at a level when the body system is struggling with fatigue and insufficient energy can be channeled to the task of finding good grades and even reaching the end goals of self-actualization and communal productivity and coexistence.

Need for Strategic Organization

We have developed our ideas so far to the extent of seeing how a scholar is faced with intrinsic and extrinsic challenges that stand in the way of how to get good grades in school. The situation is akin to that of a person engaged in a struggle, and when we look at the matter keenly we realize that since all forces can be resolved into the four basic elements of air, fire, water and earth, then we can model the whole scene of struggle into the basic elements and the actors or the student may be identified with the same forces. This implies that the student has the opportunity to model his/her struggle accordingly and consider the strategies that can get him or her how to get good grades at school. Though the field of strategy development is vast, a good place to start with is by doing the so called ‘SWOT’ analysis where we seek to understand our Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats and fashion deliberate plans that can take us to our objectives of self-actualization and overall productivity.

Using Tactics for How to Get Good Grades in School

The main arena for tactics in how to get good grades at university or how to get good grades at a level is in the examination room. Principally, tactics are most useful in the context of how to get good grades and not study. As we clarified above, ‘not studying’ has the essential quality of not spending time reading books on a subject or unit.

Most tactics in this case demand that we fulfill the above conditions of fitness and preparation, and then we need to:

• Remember that all things are made up of the four basic elements or numbers that can be derived using Euclidean geometry
• Recall that linguistic analysis is sufficient for one to get clues on the best answers probable for a set of questions
• Realize that there should be a basic economy of action in our exams where we start with the relatively easy questions and advance to the most difficult while being conscious of how we allot time to each of the questions
• Note that correct answers normally tend to stable mindsets especially if we can paraphrase or even describe features in our own words.

Once we read and understand these basic postulates regarding tactics then we can see that only contexts and situations can direct us on how best to use tactics for how to get good grades in school.

Conclusion

Our article has shown how the student is akin to the warrior in battle and has detailed how the student can best organize him/herself to optimally attain the twofold objectives of self-actualization and enhanced professional and communal productivity.

“Your turn!”