The Easiest Way to Get High Grades

The first step to winning a game is to show up.

You probably already know this, but secondary school isn’t about learning and/or personal growth; it’s a game. Some students hate it and refuse to play while others achieve Super Saiyan level. If you’re here, you likely recognize that you’re not maximizing your potential. So let’s see if we can’t sort you out.

First, we’ve got to identify the goal of the game. What is it?

Points.

You’re currently thinking about all the teachers you’ve just met and how they really seem to care and are all using the My-classroom-is-different-I-really-want-you-to-learn-the-material! syllabus presentation. I’ll admit that some of them are telling the truth. They really do care if you learn. If you’ve got a burnout who should be retired (and I might be talking about a 32-year-old here), you’ll know, so your job with him is easier. All he really wants is to get through the year with minimum hassle. That’s VERY good news for points-players since all you have to do is demonstrate that you (and hopefully your parents too, if you can get them on board) will be deeply concerned and very engaged if you get too many scores lower than 90%.

But the deluded teachers who think they’re actually teaching you something? They are the ones you need help with. Vaya con dios, mijo if you have a true believer in the power of public education.

Those people will change your life – usually for the worse – because they deny reality: that school is a game where the only thing that’s measurably incentivized are high GPAs themselves. What is not incentivized is internalizing knowledge and processes to support the analysis of complex problems in order to facilitate methodical, nuanced evaluation of the best answers and eventual application thereof.

Wait, what? Do people do that in school?

Sure, but it’s iridium-rare.

You know what’s not rare though?

Participation points, worksheets, and multiple choice tests. Those, my friends, are your moneymakers.

There are more or less three ways to get points with these teachers:

1. Show up.
2. Work.
3. Test.

We’ll deal with #1 this week. Over the next three weeks as I cover #2 and #3, you’ll get an overview of a strategy to help you make it through this year with optimal grades.

1. Show Up.

Many teachers will not give you points just for coming, but some do. What will affect your grade, attendance-wise, is walking into class late. Teachers often subtract points for that. The savviest ones will do that by having a quiz or Do-Now activity on the board that they will tell you can’t be made up if you’re not in class.

Sidenote: that’s not technically legal, at least not in Cali, so you could challenge them on it, BUT if you do that, you’re more than likely going to receive make-up work that’s ten times harder than the original quiz/Do-Now, so here’s ProTip #1:

If you’re hunting points, get to class on time.

I already gave you one reason, but here’s the Big Chungus: walking in late makes you look disrespectful.

Look, you and I both know that it’s not really disrespectful, it’s just that you have different priorities and, for whatever reason, on days you come late, the value of getting to class on time is less than the value you place on whatever made you tardy.

The problem is this: teachers take it personally. If you read my first post, you’ll understand this, but if you didn’t, the TL;DR is that teachers often suspect they’re ineffective. Sure, they’re good at lots of quantifiable things: worksheets graded in an hour; emails written over lunch; letters of recommendation finished in an evening, documents word processed cleanly. What they can’t quantify is how well you learned from them. (Grades do not accurately reflect learning: change my mind.)

So imagine the thing you’re getting paid a princely sum to do (and by princely I mean that, in general, teachers earn more than the average worker in any geographical area and work 66% of the time that average worker does) is something you have no idea if you’re good at because there is no tangible evidence to prove it..

You might get the odd, anecdotal You’re-my-favorite-teacher-ever-I’m-learning-so-much-in-your-class from a student, but as you Super Saiyans know, compliments like that aren’t always sincere, especially near the end of a grading period.

Teachers know that too.

Grades are a terrible measure of learning. Every single one of you can recount a class where you never cracked the textbook, did little to no work (or had Google do it for you), pseudo-studied with friends for a couple of hours the night before the final exam and still managed a B or an A. If you tell me you learned anything in that class other than how misaligned the rewards are to the stated goal, you’re a lying liar who lies.

Some teachers like to point to exam scores. Unfortunately, any idiot can teach to a four-option multiple choice test, especially when he has the test in his hand from day one.

I’ll give the AP/IB teachers some credit here, just because they can’t be exactly sure what will be on the test. After a few years though, they should have a pretty good idea of what their students need to know so they’re definitely teaching to a test rather than looking for opportunities to measure students higher-level thinking and problem-solving skills. And that’s because the College Board can’t measure those either; it would eviscerate their sky-high profit margins.

I prefer using essays as assessments, but we all know that essay grading is arbitrary and essay writing usually consists of repeating what the teacher told you in lecture while furiously overcomplicating your sentences and throwing in [often poorly-chosen] SAT-vocab synonyms for shorter words to meet the length requirement. And let’s just skip the conversation about manipulating margins, kerning, and punctuation font sizes.

The problem with all of the aforementioned is that none of these methods can accurately gauge learning; they usually only measure recall. They can’t account for nuance. They can’t address individual interest. They can’t bring the best out in you. Any analysis used in a paper is, more often than not, parroted from lecture or, even worse, stolen from the internet or, still worse, paid to some likely much harder-working citizen of a developing nation.

And every teacher knows that. That’s why when those stupid Hero Teacher movies come out, it’s always some anecdotal, Hollywood-massaged poppycock about how the students developed as people, often using test scores (see above) or college acceptances (don’t get me started) or personal development (how do you quantify that?) as proof positive of effective teaching.

Anywayyyyyyzzzzz, what I’m saying is that your teachers know, whether it’s a conscious thought after much observation and analysis or at a more primal level, that they have no idea how good they are or even if they are.

But your attendance? That they can control through punishment. More importantly for our purposes here, this perceived dis biases them against you. No matter how fair-minded a teacher prides himself on being, he will notice if you are frequently late or missing, and he will consider it an act of defiance on your part, whether or not that is actually the case. He will take it personally.

How do you think that’s going to affect you when you end up with an 89.4 in a class?

So don’t be late.

And this should honestly go without saying, but, just in case it doesn’t: don’t ditch class.

If you care about your grades, these are literally the easiest adjustments you can make to achieve your overarching goals: get that GPA to bust out while simultaneously having one of the best years of your life.