What to Do If Your Grades Are Slipping
By Amy Baldwin, English professor, Pulaski Technical College
You may have already had the final exam nightmare. You know the one. It’s the last week of the semester, and you realize that you signed up for a course that you never attended, and now you are about take a final exam. Before you can feel the embarrassment of failing a course because you forgot to go to class and keep up with the work, you wake up in a cold sweat.
While it is just a dream for many students and a pretty typical one that you may experience even after you graduate, it can be closer to reality for those students who let their grades slip and do little to help their situation.
In fact, 69% of students in a recent Student Health 101 survey reported that they had been through a period where their grades had declined. Over 75% of those who did experience slipping grades cited poor time management as the reason. When these same students got help, over half of students sought advice from a professor or from study groups to help them get back on track.
Watch Out for Falling Grades
Nick Brydon, a junior biochemistry/molecular biology major at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee, knows all too well how students can fall behind. “I remember myself saying things like ‘I wish there were more hours in a day’ during a few bad weeks last semester,” he says.
“Every student endures busy times like this in their course of study,” says Brydon. While he admits that some students can keep up even during the craziest times of the semester, he does “think students fall behind in their work when they are swamped with assignments. Two exams, a paper, and a quiz all in one week? That’s swamped.”
Liz Daggett, assistant professor of art at Rhodes College, says this can even happen to smart students at academically rigorous colleges and universities. “The number one thing I see [when grades start slipping] is that a student will be sick and will have excused absences and think everything’s okay,” says Daggett. “But they missed so many things that were discussed or watched in class that aren’t in their friends’ notes or in the books, and then the midterm or final is a disaster.”
Not attending class regularly and missing important information and experiences are just two things that can lead to falling grades. Other forerunners to falling grades include not putting in enough time studying or working on assignments and not seeking appropriate help when a problem does arise.
“The most common reason that I see is time put into a task,” says Kathleen Laakso, associate dean of students at Rhodes College. “The students I see who have trouble are not putting in sufficient time. Instead, they are employing surface-level strategies—techniques that worked well in high school, but that don’t work as well in a rigorous college environment.”
According to the same Student Health 101 survey, only 36% have dropped a class because of slipping grades, but 68% believe they have waited too long to get the help they needed. Laakso confirms that students in academic trouble often “cut themselves off from people who can help. They don’t talk to faculty. [Some students] are not accustomed to talking to teachers.”
Other students may be generally uncomfortable with asking for help for fear of looking “dumb” or because of the desire to succeed without the help of others. These strategies can be equally disastrous if other avenues of getting on track are not explored. Regardless of how students get to a place where their grades are slipping, the goal is to find out what they are missing and learn to look for the major concepts that their professors are looking for in their papers and tests, advises Laakso.
Getting Back on Track
The advice from students, faculty, and administrators for getting back on track in a class where your grades have started slipping sounds much like the advice for starting out on the right foot at the beginning of the semester. “Set a goal to keep a student planner and keep a reading log. Know what day you’re going to have your materials read and assignments turned in to your instructor,” says Leslie Mahoney, a sophomore liberal arts major at Arkansas State University-Beebe. In other words, get organized and and keep up with your work.
When it comes to improving your grades when you stumble at the beginning of the semester, it is best to think ahead of the deadline. “I think being proactive makes the difference here,” says Brydon. “Professors usually assign papers and projects weeks ahead of their deadlines, and there is no reason to wait to get started on them.”
Daggett says, “The syllabus is the contract that is given to you at the beginning of the year. Know what you have to do, mathematically, to get the grade you want.” This requires taking a calendar and calculating the days and hours you need to get the work done.
Daggett, who advises students in addition to teaching, also tells her struggling students to “make sure any feedback is clear to you. If you did poorly on an assignment, often the professor is only able to tell you what went wrong. Ask for a good example of what they were looking for, and often it becomes clearer.”
More Tips for Getting on Course
Even if you do struggle, many professors and advisors, such as Dean Laakso, want students to “understand that they have the ability to do the work. It’s not a lack of innate intelligence but rather the lack of strategies that they are using” that can cause them to falter.
Some strategies for getting back on track after experiencing a stumble include:
Understand that there are multiple ways of learning. Memorization is the ground level—not the end of learning. You have to apply the facts to a new situation and work with synthesis and analysis.
Compare graded tests to class notes. See what you missed.
Review notes within 24 hours of taking them. That will help you keep up with the material.
Participate in a “Power Hour.” This is a 60-minute chunk of time to work on a class by reading and annotating assignments and doing this repeatedly over that time.
Find and utilize online resources. For example, to see helpful study advice from Louisiana State University in Shreveport, CLICK HERE.
You have the power to change that nightmare of failing a class into the reality of succeeding.
AMY BALDWIN TEACHES WRITING, LITERATURE, AND COLLEGE SUCCESS AT PULASKI TECHNICAL COLLEGE IN NORTH LITTLE ROCK, ARKANSAS.
Find Out More
Click for great study tips from the Academic Skills Center at Dartmouth College.
Click for a number of steps you can use to improve your grades from Santa Rosa Junior College.
Click for list of 11 top study skills from Stanford University.
