How to Do Well in College Level English Courses

Many of my students are literally shaking on their first day of college English. They're terrified and afraid that they will make fools of themselves and hurt their GPAs by not getting a good grade. Fortunately, there are many things they can do to ensure that they will do well in their first college English class. Though none of these techniques guarantees an A, they will certainly make the student do better than he or she would have done without them.

1. Ask for a rubric. When the professor makes an assignment, ask if he or she has a rubric they can give you. A rubric is a detailed description of how the paper will be graded, and will often indicate what percentage of a paper's grade is based on grammar, what percentage is based on logic, what percentage on research, etc. If the teacher gives you a rubric, pay close attention to it because it will tell you what the professor values and how he or she will be grading you.

2. Know specifically what it takes to get an A. My brother-in-law and his classmates once struggled through an entire semester of being unable to get As on any of their English papers. During the last week of the semester one of the students finally asked the professor, "What does it take to get an A on a paper?" The professor immediately replied, "An A paper is ten pages or longer." As unreasonable as this rule is, if one of the students had simply asked what it took to get an A earlier in the course, they could all have been getting As.

3. Attend the writing center. Most universities have free writing centers at which students can get feedback on all aspects of their papers, from their ideas to their research to their grammar. Taking advantage of these programs can make an enormous difference in a student's performance. In the first class I taught, I had a student whose writing was so bad that I feared he wouldn't even pass the course. He made a standing weekly appointment with the writing center and by the end of the class, he had the second-highest grade in the course.

4. Visit the professor during office hours. The purpose of these visits is not to suck up or to "bond," but rather to ask specific questions about your paper. Showing up at your professor's office to ask for advice serves three purposes. First, getting the professor's advice will make your paper better and therefore result in a higher grade. Second, if the professor knows that you have sought his or her advice and can tell that you've tried to incorporate it, he or she is likely to give you a higher grade, even if you didn't quite succeed at what he or she told you to do. Finally, seeking the professor's advice early in the writing process shows him or her that you are serious about doing well, and when they are assigning final course grades, that perception can result in a higher grade.

5. Participate in class. Active class participation shows the professor that you have been reading the material and that you are serious about getting a good grade. Most professors reserve the right to "bump" grades up if they feel that the student deserves it, and at the end of the semester that participation bump can move you from a B to a B+ or from an A- to an A.

6. Ask for extensions if you need them. It is far better to explain your circumstances to the professor and ask for an extension than to not turn work in, turn it in late, or plagiarize a paper out of desperation.

These six techniques are the secret weapons of students who get good grades. By doing these six things, many of the same students who were trembling on their first day were grinning on the last. They walked out of the final exam knowing that they had done well in their first English class.