by Lawrence Green: College Study Skills Specialist And Creator Of “The Lazy Study Guide” {MCA (BPSS), M.Phil (Psychology), BCA (Hons)}
Why do some students succeed so easily with college study while others work really hard and struggle to get by? What if there was a way to slash your study time and get better results? What would that mean for your lifestyle and your future career?
My name is Lawrence Green and I would like to share my story with you. It’s a story of ambition, frustration, despair, discovery, under-achievement, near failure, progress and finally, miraculous achievement (or so it seemed to me at the time).
It’s a story about the little-known secrets in ‘how to study in college’ that I found along the way and the discovery of The Ultimate College Study Skills Secret, the secret that showed me how to achieve excellent grades in a fraction of the time…
It was my second year at college and I was standing outside the exam room waiting to go in. I was taking the final exam for my first (and last!) paper in Operations Research.
I had already failed both internal assessments and I now needed to score a minimum of 70% in the final exam just to score a ‘C’ for the paper. In the past, I could never seem to perform in exams (even though I put every exam tactic I could find into practice).
So for this exam I should have been shaking in my boots… but I wasn’t. In fact I was surprisingly calm. And later, when my final results came back, I discovered I had passed the course comfortably.
At first I was shocked. This was the first exam in my life where my final course grade had actually improved as a result of my exam performance – and not by a little but a lot! At first I couldn’t work out why my exam performance was so much better. After all, I hadn’t changed any of my exam preparation tactics. So I became really curious about why this was…
So I started reading every book I could find on the psychology of performance to try to understand how my mindset shaped my results. Once I got past all the theoretical jargon, I began to see that there is a pattern to how some students succeed under pressure while most under-perform or ‘choke’.
When I combined the right mindset with the right exam preparation tactics, I was able to take charge of my tests and exams. And the result… the course material ‘stuck’ more quickly… I became much more confident in what I knew… and I spent a lot less time doing exam prep.
Yes, I still needed to do some study, but I no longer needed to perform more poorly in exams than my internal assessments.
Early in my college career I tried to be a ‘good student’ and read everything that my lecturers told me...