Walking the College GPA Tightrope: Maintaining a High GPA

In college, exam week serves as the end of the semester, the end of late-night studying, and the end of weekly parties with your closest friends. To some, exam week may also seem like the end of their life as parents eventually learn of semester grades! However, with a little research and planning, making good grades and scoring a high GPA can become much easier. Not only will you sport a stronger academic record, but your parents will be proud, as well. Who knows? Maybe they will even provide a little more cash for that summer road trip...

Plan Your Courses
The most important concept of college academics is planning your semester-by-semester layout for the future. Know what classes you will have to take, and which you can avoid. If your best subject is math, why take an optional history course and risk lowering your GPA? Planning ahead and knowing what your future holds in terms of courses also helps when researching courses and getting the dirt on professors. Also, many colleges and universities post future course schedules online days in advance of registration. Take a peek at the professors of the courses and make note of professorship trends (that is, see if the same guy teaches every semester or only in the fall). This will be useful later when online researching comes into play.

Ask Around
College is about making new friends, going to parties, and having fun, right? Well, take the time to interrogate a friend or upperclassmen who has already taken the course for which you are planning to register. Ask him who his professor was, what kind of work the course involved, and how effective the professor taught, overall. But why stop there? Since he is a friend, you have a good chance of predicting how motivated he was in that course. So, ask what his final grade was for the course. If he tends to be somewhat of a slacker and made a B, you can figure how you compare to his level of devotion to the course and predict your own final grade. Also ask about professors to avoid, interesting electives courses, and tips for scheduling classes.