Tough Calls: Learn or Pass?

One of the many ideas I talk about in Higher Learning is the choice that students often have to face — do I learn the material or do I try to do well on the exam. Seems like this shouldn’t be an either-or, but those of us who’ve had to read a three-hundred page book, write two short papers, study for a midterm, and do a lab report all in 48 hours (in addition to having some semblance of a college student’s life… which could mean 48 hours of studying or 48 hours of not studying, depending on how disciplined one is) understand that there are choices to be made. When you start your work earlier, you can choose to go deeper, and learn more (Daily Graduate #38). It takes time to get to this point. You have to get into a good groove with your overall studies, activities, and time management, so that you can truly understand how much time you have to work with. You don’t want to sabotage yourself when it’s time to study by not leaving enough time to do a good job.

Once you’ve gotten the hang of things on campus, you’ll get a better sense for which classes you want to truly explore and which you want to excel in but stick more closely to the minimums on the syllabus rather than diving deeper into your own additional research and readings. You have to be strategic about this, because at the end of the day, your ultimate constraint is literally the end of the day. You won’t be able to do everything, every day. But if you learn how to learn more effectively, and you set your sights on getting more out of class and campus, then you’ll be going into the balancing act much better prepared than other students who have no idea what they’re doing and end up solely focused on surviving exams rather than thriving. Put yourself in a position to thrive. Go Higher!