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Grades aren’t everything, but for some people they’re the only thing. Grades are an important way to measure your success in college, but they are not the only results you’re after. You need to find a way to make college personally fulfilling. You need to craft a customized college experience that really floats your boat. When you make college personally rewarding, you grades go through the roof.

Here are five ways to get better grades while in college.

1. Take amazing notes

You need to go to class fully prepared and ready for war. It’s not enough to just sit down and absorb. You need to document all the action as it unfolds. When you take amazing notes, you learn more during and after your lectures. During your lectures, you are more aware of the information that’s being presented to you, because you are processing it on two levels, one mental and one physical. After your lectures, you have a written historical account of all the ideas, dates and references that you were exposed to that day. This record can then be used for assignment execution and test preparation.

2. Bring a unique perspective to every assignment

You need to strive toward originality. If you want to distinguish yourself from your other classmates, you have to bring a unique perspective to every assignment. You can’t recycle old arguments and popular sentiments, you must create a new, imaginative spin. Combine multiple perspectives in a new way. Challenge something or be controversial. If you can back up your original claims with solid analysis, then you’ll get excellent grades on every assignment.

3. Find an ally in class

You need to have at least one partner in crime for every class that you take. Target someone interesting. Introduce yourself and your intentions. Exchange phone numbers and talk about your coursework outside of class. If you can combine your know-how with someone else’ s bucket of accumulated information, then you’ll achieve better marks on your tests and assignments.

4. Get a tutor if you need to

If you need some extra instruction, find a tutor. Tutors will give you a supplemental method of learning that’s conversational and personally tailored to your academic needs. Work on your weaknesses. Get extra help, put in extra time and your grades will improve.

5. Choose courses that really interest you

Love the courses you enroll in, or shop around for better options. Be intrigued by the material and let your curiosity take over.

Discover what study method(s) work best for you. Experiment with a few different approaches, and when you find the one that fits your personality, perfect it. Work on getting betting grades, but put personal growth ahead of GPA considerations.

Review more industry related articles by Chris Stout at

It will be several hours until the alarm buzzes, but suddenly a man bolts up to a near-sitting position in bed. The room is peaceful, yet he’s terrified, and can’t immediately reason why. Then, after convincing himself that all’s calm and he’s safe, he begins to unravel a few details of what has just scared him awake.

Another alarm sounds and a woman shuts it off, pulls the covers over her head and tries desperately to return to what was so abruptly interrupted. There were flowers and a blue sky. She was sixteen and size eight again.

In another house, a five year old runs into her parent’s bedroom, waking them at 2.00 a.m. because she woke up to find a monster sitting on her lampshade.

Dreams can be convincing. They can be prophetic. They can also be elusive. Some people swear they never have them, while others have almost total recall of a great number of them. Some people can even get totally engrossed in a semi-dream state during the day.

Researchers have a variety of theories explaining the phenomenon of dreaming. Some say that dreams help us get back in touch with our inner individual self. This is reinforced whenever we’re confronted with a problem that hasn’t been solved by the end of the day and we’re told to “sleep on it,” as if the answer is going to somehow sashay to the surface later in the night.

Another theory is that dreaming is our mind’s way of cleaning the clutter from our mental computer so we can retain the more important stuff. This might explain why we wake up tired…we’ve simply swept our brains too much during the night. Often, students study directly before going to sleep, thinking that the information will be more easily retained and recalled the next day.

Yet another theory for dreaming is that it helps us understand what we’ve seen, felt and experienced, in somewhat of an information assimilation process. That it acts as our own personal housekeeper and file clerk.

Apparently, we’re all quite active during sleep time. Scientists say that we sleep each night in 4 or 5, ninety-minute stages. It is during the REM (Rapid Eye Movement) stage that we do our best dreaming. We have a dream segment approximately every 90 minutes. Usually though, we won’t remember any of them unless we’ve been interrupted and awakened while they were happening.

It seems that if you’ve mastered the art of “lucid dreaming” you can control the conversation and action and pretty much have things your way. As of yet though, I’ve never been able to do that, asleep or awake.

There are many dream interpretation books available, but chances are you know someone who immediately explains your dream by saying, “Well, you obviously must have been thinking about it sometime that day.” (”Yes, Aunt Clarese, I was thinking about a barking bat taking off with my blow dryer earlier at lunch today.”)

Certain circumstances can affect the type of dreams we have. Eating food a short time before going to sleep can pave the way for some unique experiences. Or watching a scary movie can increase the odds that you’ll have a scary dream that night. Stress and worry can also affect our dreams.

I guess I don’t mind entering the somewhat fantasy world of a dream, as long as there are no ten foot tap-dancing artichokes yelling advice and trying to sell me a condo on the beach. But forget them or recall them, ignore them or try to interpret them…dreams are a part of our life and it’s for our benefit that they’re going to continue to be.

Regenia G. Butcher is an author on Writing.Com ( Writing.Com/ Writing.Com/). Visit her writings at sensity.Writing.Com sensity.Writing.Com and read for a while.