How to Get Straight A's in College: A Weekly Plan That Holds Up

Straight A's in college is a scheduling problem more than an intelligence problem. The students who get them are not studying more than you. They are doing a small set of things every week without skipping, and those things are the ones that research keeps finding actually move a grade. This is the weekly plan, plus the parts most guides leave out: what to do when you fall behind, and which classes to treat differently.

What an A actually requires

An A in most college classes means ninety percent or better on a mix of exams and work. That leaves room for one bad exam if the rest is solid, and no room for a semester where you understood everything in lecture and could not produce it on test day. The gap between understanding and producing is where A's turn into B+'s, and it closes with practice testing, not rereading. Karpicke and Blunt (2011) found that students who practiced retrieving material remembered more a week later than students who spent the same time on concept mapping, which is about as thorough as studying gets.

The weekly plan

1. Sunday, 30 minutes: look at the week. Every exam, due date and reading across all classes, on one page. Decide which class gets the most hours this week. It changes every week.
2. Every lecture day, 20 minutes: questions. Same day, turn the lecture into questions. If you recorded it or have the slides, this is fast. Anything the professor said about the exam goes on a separate list.
3. Every other day, 20 minutes per class: answer. From memory. Mark what you missed. The misses are your only study list.
4. Saturday, one hour: mixed review. Questions from every class, including early weeks. This is what keeps week two alive in week ten.
5. Assignments: start the day they are assigned. Not to finish, to outline. A problem set outlined on day one takes half the time of one started the night before, because you find out what you do not understand while there is still a lecture to ask in.

Where A's are actually lost

• The first exam. You do not know the professor's style yet. Find an old exam, ask in office hours what the format is, and over prepare for the first one. Everything after is calibration.
• The easy class. The class you are not worried about is the one that gets a B because you gave it no hours. Check the weekly plan: every class gets at least its minimum.
• Participation and small assignments. Five percent here and ten percent there is the difference between an A and an A minus. Do all of them, early, and badly if you have to. A submitted rough draft beats a perfect one that is late.
• Falling behind and hiding. Two missed weeks is recoverable. Two missed weeks plus avoiding the class because you are behind is not. Go to office hours the week you fall behind.

By class type

Lecture classes with exams

Professors test what they spend time on in lecture. Your questions come from lecture first. Keep the list of everything they said about the exam, and make sure every item on it is in your questions.

Problem-set classes

The questions are worked problems. Re-do the professor's examples without the solution, then re-do the ones you missed two days later. The exam has a variant you have not seen; practice the type.

Paper classes

The A is in the argument and the professor's feedback on it. Write the thesis first, get the outline looked at in office hours, and start a week earlier than feels necessary. Nobody gets an A on a paper written in one night in a class where the professor knows what a one-night paper looks like.

Tools, briefly

All of this works with paper. The slow parts are writing the questions and keeping the review schedule, and those are the parts software does well. Availa, which I make, does both from the slides you upload and keeps each class separate. Anki does the scheduling if you write the cards. The comparison is in best study apps for college students.

Common questions

Is it possible to get straight A's in college while working?

Yes, and the plan above is built for it. It is about an hour per class per week outside exam weeks. What it does not allow is skipping the same-day questions, because catching up on those is what eats weekends.

What GPA is straight A's?

A 4.0 if every grade is an A. Many schools count A minus as 3.7, so straight A's and a 4.0 are not always the same thing. The 4.0 version of this plan is in how to get a 4.0 GPA in college.

How do I get an A in a class I am bad at?

Give it the most hours in the weekly plan, go to office hours every week with a specific question, and do practice problems in the exam format until the setup is automatic. Being bad at a subject usually means being slow at it, and slow is fixed by repetition.