In trying to uphold my strong GPA and in hopes of achieving Summa Cum Laude in my senior year of high school, I tried many strategies to not allow my grades to slip. When I saw the grade of my first exam in Physics 1, I realized that just attending the lectures and not practicing on my own did not work, especially for a class like Physics, where practice strengthens learning. Through experimenting, I recognized that in order to truly learn from a class, I needed to put in more effort to maintain and hopefully boost my GPA.
For instance, I learned that I should never let myself stay confused about a concept; I had to clarify the topics in order to create a strong foundation to learn future lessons. With this in mind, I started to ask more questions and answer practice problems displayed by my teacher in class. Even if my answer was wrong, I and many others learned from my mistakes, which enabled me not to make those same mistakes again. I also worked hand-in-hand with my peers and had a support system with them, where we would teach each other the lessons. We would act like a professor who was teaching the material to the students. This allowed my brain to process the material, and if I couldn’t adequately explain, I would review it and try teaching again. Along with teaching, I would review what I got wrong in my past exams and quizzes and attempt them once again to see if I had thoroughly learned the topics. I would keep reviewing them and similar problems until I fully comprehended the process of solving them.
Another strategy that really helped was taking extra credit even when I didn’t necessarily need to. Turning in extra credit allowed me to have a cushion in case I didn’t do well on an exam that was worth a lot for my grade. Recently, I did extra credit for my physics 2 class when my grade was above 100%, which brought me up to 101%. After taking my final, my grade went down to 98%, but it would have been worse if I hadn’t put in the additional effort to maintain my grade. Although the difference was not much, every little ounce of effort counts.
Ultimately, in my last year of high school, I learned that when I go to college, I will have to put in more work than what I have been doing in the past years of my education. This is great because I am now learning how to be resourceful and what approaches work or don’t work for my studies.
