Starting in July 2012, ETS will allow you to choose which GRE scores you report to schools rather than just reporting every GRE score for the last five years as they had been doing. ETS, the maker of the GRE, is NOT your friend, so why the sudden burst of magnanimity? I think I’ve figured it out.

Let’s say, you pay your $160 and go take your GRE. At the end of the exam, but BEFORE you actually know how you scored, ETS gives you the option of either reporting all your GRE scores from every GRE you’ve taken for the last five years, OR you can just report the GRE score you got on the test you just completed. That isn’t so helpful, since you really don’t know how you’ve done on today’s GRE yet. (I can’t tell from their online blurb if you have the option of accepting your GRE score–but NOT actually sending it to any of your four colleges included in your $160 test fee.)

On the other hand, if you want to take a look at all your GRE scores and then pick and choose which one(s) to send to different grad schools, you’ll have to wait until you’ve left the testing center. Then they will charge you extra cold-hard cash for the privilege.  Sounds like a money-making deal for ETS!

Regardless, it’s probably going to be worth it to pay for the privilege of only reporting your best GRE scores. Unfortunately, you can’t report just the verbal GRE score from one administration and just the math from another time you took the test. You have to report the complete GRE score for any given date you took the test.

See all the details from ETS here.

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Cody Blair has spent over a decade helping students and teachers discover the secrets that make learning simple! His ebook, Secrets Smart Students Know, reveals how the best students use powerful study skills, maximize their memory, avoid procrastination, and maximize their focus to achieve fantastic grades with much less work! Click now to find out more about simple methods to maximize your study skills.

© Cody Blair, All Rights Reserved. You may reprint the above article as long as you include the above bio/resource information in full, including the functioning links. Do not make any changes to the article or bio. If you can't include clickable links, please ask permission to reprint.

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Cody Blair has spent over a decade helping students and teachers discover the secrets that make learning simple! His ebook, Secrets Smart Students Know, reveals how the best students use powerful study skills, maximize their memory, avoid procrastination, and maximize their focus to achieve fantastic grades with much less work! Click now to find out more about simple methods to maximize your study skills.

© Cody Blair, All Rights Reserved. You may reprint the above article as long as you include the above bio/resource information in full, including the functioning links. Do not make any changes to the article or bio. If you can't include clickable links, please ask permission to reprint.

Recently, a student asked me for my hot list of academic life-changers; key study skills you can use to dominate your grades. Here goes…

1) Get help. It’s the 21st Century, fellow netizens! Flying cars, robotic house maids, and personal jet packs are now commonplace… okay, well, maybe not. But it’s still the 21st Century!, which means you don’t have to rely on your brilliant professor’s rapid-fire mumble-lectures and micro-type PowerPoints. Use the interwebs and find help online. Get tutoring. Talk to the TA, a grad student, or another prof. Hell’s Bells, peeps, phone a friend! Going it alone is soooo last century. This is an instant study skills upgrade! BONUS: Active learning, taking charge of your own education, also amps up your focus!
2) Stop procrastination. Procrastination is enemy number-one for my erstwhile readers, and it’s a totally fixable problem. Take a look here for loads of proven, rock-solid techniques for making procrastination just one more item on the long list of problems other people have. Stopping procrastination is also one of those study skills that will serve you well in other areas of your life!
3) Fix your focus fails. One thing skeet-shooting champs, tigers, fighter pilots, birds of prey, and neurosurgeons have in common; they can refrain from checking their electronic iCrack while trying to concentrate. Developing the focus of half-starved jungle cat on Aderol is within your grasp; just take a look at these posts.
4) Use your down time. Time management is not just for business execs and planner fiends. Time management is for students! How much time do you spend singing along with Adele at stop lights, ambling across campus, or playing Angry Birds while waiting for your next class to start? That’s not time management, people; that’s wasted time (except for maybe Adele). Instead, make time management one of your main student tools. Treat school like an 8 to 5 job and carry your study fodder with you (Flash cards? Notes? Anki?) so that any time is study time. Do that, and you might actually have time for a real (guilt-free) social life. More info here.
5)  Teach to learn. The single best way I know to master new materials is to teach it to someone else, mainly because it fosters active learning. What’s active learning? It’s when you get off your passive “feed me” academic keister and start taking charge of your own learning. Active learning is, well, active! Teaching the information you are learning to someone else forces you to engage in active learning. Here’s how.  Take the notes you make in class or while reading for a class, and use them as an outline while you teach the topic to a motivated learner (even if that learner is just in your imagination). Learn more.

Get help with your academic troubles and sore spots. Stop procrastination cold and get moving. Fix your focus fails and up your concentration. Use your down time and translate time management into better grades. Teach you study materials to someone else to learn it better yourself. Those are definitely the big five study skills that will make your academic life thrive. Take a look at my ebook, Secrets Smart Students Know, for more details on all of the above study skills and mucho mas.

Have a useful tip or tool that really made your academic life easier? Share the wealth in the comments. Please click one of the social sharing links below to spread the joy.

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Cody Blair has spent over a decade helping students and teachers discover the secrets that make learning simple! His ebook, Secrets Smart Students Know, reveals how the best students use powerful study skills, maximize their memory, avoid procrastination, and maximize their focus to achieve fantastic grades with much less work! Click now to find out more about simple methods to maximize your study skills.

© Cody Blair, All Rights Reserved. You may reprint the above article as long as you include the above bio/resource information in full, including the functioning links. Do not make any changes to the article or bio. If you can't include clickable links, please ask permission to reprint.

First: Make sure you take thorough notes. You can’t master the material if you don’t remember what it was. For a more in-depth how-to on taking noteworthy notes–notes that will cause your professor to weep uncontrollably and set up a shrine to you in the staff lounge–look here. As you’re capturing those notes, be sure to get down the high-payoff items, and I mean payoff in terms of exam grades. You want only to study the info that will actually boost your GPA. Not sure if an item is going to be on the test? Write it down and then find out later if it’s important by asking a TA, asking a friend who’s already taken the class, looking at a test bank, or consulting your magic 8 ball. When in doubt, learn it.

Second: Review your notes within ten minutes after having taken them, perhaps while ambling across campus to your next class or over a large mug of something caffeine-y. How should you review? Use your notes as a prompt and teach the topic to an (imaginary) group of very eager–but not overly bright–young peoples (or to a friend). Teach your imaginary class out loud, as if you were actually addressing a group of students. Look at your notes only when necessary. Imagine your students are really trying to understand your analogies, explanations, and examples, but they just don’t get it the first time through. Come up with alternative explanations and more examples. Come up with a test to give them to make sure they have mastered the information. Got it? Teach it. Out loud. With extra explanations. And a test!

Third: Keep teaching your imaginary class over days and weeks until–without using your notes–it gushes forth from your face in silvery fountains of erudition. Do this on a gradually increasing schedule. Your first review is right after you take the notes. The second review is an hour (more or less) after that. Now keep tripling the time between reviews; three hours later, nine hours later, a day later, three days later, nine days later, a month later, etc. This will wedge that info into your long term memory.  Learn more about scheduling those reviews for optimal recall. See more on this in my free study skills video.

As you go through this process take special note of areas you don’t fully understand and GET HELP! The first time you try to teach a particular topic, you will find gaps–yawning abysses, even– in your understanding. Fill those gaps by…

• Talking to your professor or your TA.
• Talking to a knowledgeable friend.
• Going to tutoring sessions.
• Looking online or in other texts.

Simple as the plot to Twilight, no? Get your notes, review by teaching it on a tripling schedule, and plug the gaps in your understanding as soon as possible.

Click on a social link below and share the love!

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Cody Blair has spent over a decade helping students and teachers discover the secrets that make learning simple! His ebook, Secrets Smart Students Know, reveals how the best students use powerful study skills, maximize their memory, avoid procrastination, and maximize their focus to achieve fantastic grades with much less work! Click now to find out more about simple methods to maximize your study skills.

© Cody Blair, All Rights Reserved. You may reprint the above article as long as you include the above bio/resource information in full, including the functioning links. Do not make any changes to the article or bio. If you can't include clickable links, please ask permission to reprint.

Eliminate Distractions. Hide yourself away from friends and fun. This includes non-essential electronics.

Be Strategic. Identify the high payoff items in what you’re doing. Do them first.

Take Breaks. Set a timer and work in 30 to 45 minute bursts with short breaks in between to recharge your brain. Don’t like breaks? Take them anyway. They help! (Caveat: NOT for people with ADHD.)

Ask questions. Ask yourself tough, open-ended questions about what you are learning. Answer the questions.

Talk to yourself. Sitting in silence is a recipe for daydreaming. Talk to yourself as you think. Keeps your brain train on the tracks.

Take a more in-depth look at how to maintain focus…

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Cody Blair has spent over a decade helping students and teachers discover the secrets that make learning simple! His ebook, Secrets Smart Students Know, reveals how the best students use powerful study skills, maximize their memory, avoid procrastination, and maximize their focus to achieve fantastic grades with much less work! Click now to find out more about simple methods to maximize your study skills.

© Cody Blair, All Rights Reserved. You may reprint the above article as long as you include the above bio/resource information in full, including the functioning links. Do not make any changes to the article or bio. If you can't include clickable links, please ask permission to reprint.

• The quick and simple way to learn vocabulary for language classes and standardized tests like the GRE and SAT.
• How to soak up that tricky vocabulary like a sponge! Save time. Slave less.
• How to make those memories uber sticky. Memorize it once and it sticks for days (without more review).

A few short excerpts …

Does rote memorization work?  Yes … eventually, but compared to the other type of learning we’ve been talking about—“car wreck memory” we might call it—it’s like cooking steak with a candle.  Let’s learn how to turn on the gas.

We’ll look at four different keys to making the most of your memory…. If you apply these four keys, you will be a memory master … a black belt in brain fu … a wizard of wiles … a (fill in your own cheesy alliteration here).  Let’s get to it.

___________

We know that “car wreck” memory occurs when something is emotional and unusual.  We also know that it’s multi-sensory.  So how do we take something, like the definition of the word “turbid,” and make it multi-sensory, unusual, and emotional?

You aren’t going to believe me when I tell you.  It’s actually very easy, and it doesn’t seem real, but it absolutely works!  Here it is in a nutshell.  Ready? …

The short ebook will set you back $2.00 US. You can take that two bucks and buy a sugary drink and a bag o’ Funyuns and what do you get? Temporary taste bud titillation and diabetes.

OR you can take the same two bucks and purchase this handy quick guide to maximizing your memory,  and make studying easier for the rest of your life! Oye! Such a deal! Click the link below, pay via Paypal, and you’re off to the races…

Unforgettable .pdf eBook

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Cody Blair has spent over a decade helping students and teachers discover the secrets that make learning simple! His ebook, Secrets Smart Students Know, reveals how the best students use powerful study skills, maximize their memory, avoid procrastination, and maximize their focus to achieve fantastic grades with much less work! Click now to find out more about simple methods to maximize your study skills.

© Cody Blair, All Rights Reserved. You may reprint the above article as long as you include the above bio/resource information in full, including the functioning links. Do not make any changes to the article or bio. If you can't include clickable links, please ask permission to reprint.

Holy-frikkin-mooses. I just read three paragraphs in my Whirled History book, and I don’t have clue one on what it was about. How can I fish the beefy info chunks outta the steamy cesspool of facts that is my reading assignment?

If that’s your main pain, then consider this simple drill to make your mind into a magnet for important points in your reading.

First, mark up a (disposable) copy of your reading assignment. Take a red pen or marker and start eliminating non-essential words. Get all guvmint-censor/evil-english-teacher on it. Your goal is to mark out as much of each sentence as possible while still retaining the overall meaning. It should look like you tapped a vein and bled all over the paper.

Next, rephrase what’s left as needed to clarify the meaning and summarize the info. Again, try to minimize the number of words while keeping the meaning.

Finally, abbreviate words and phrases to eliminate excess letters. Imagine you’re sending a text message and you’ll be charged by the letter. How much can you boil out the non-essential and keep your meaning? Feel free to use texting shortcuts, like “gr8″ for “great.”

Here’s a zample using a paragraph from About.com…

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Cody Blair has spent over a decade helping students and teachers discover the secrets that make learning simple! His ebook, Secrets Smart Students Know, reveals how the best students use powerful study skills, maximize their memory, avoid procrastination, and maximize their focus to achieve fantastic grades with much less work! Click now to find out more about simple methods to maximize your study skills.

© Cody Blair, All Rights Reserved. You may reprint the above article as long as you include the above bio/resource information in full, including the functioning links. Do not make any changes to the article or bio. If you can't include clickable links, please ask permission to reprint.

I’ve got an easy fix to help keep your wayward brain on track and boost your comprehension.

Don’t be like Saint Ambrose.

Saint Augustine noted that when he went to visit Ambrose–then the bishop of a hoppin’ 4th Century Milan–he often found him reading silently. No lie. The guy read without saying the words out loud! I know. Weird, right? “When he read,” noted Augustine, “his eyes scanned the page and his heart sought out the meaning, but his voice was silent and his tongue was still. Anyone could approach him freely and guests were not commonly announced, so that often, when we came to visit him, we found him reading like this in silence, for he never read aloud.” Although there is some reason to believe that others had read silently before Ambrose, it was considered very out of the ordinary! Most people in the ancient world read out loud apparently, and in Europe this persisted up until the 10th Century (Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading. New York, Viking, 1996).

Ancient students knew something most of us don’t. It sometimes really helps to read out loud. In fact, reading aloud not only ratchets up your focus, it increases your comprehension. The Summary of the (U.S.) National Reading Panel Report noted the positive effects of guided oral reading on many reading skills including comprehension. My own experience as a teacher has borne this out. It’s amazing how often my students struggle with GRE reading comprehension questions who, two minutes later, are slapping themselves in the forehead when I read the same question to them out loud. What was confusing and tangled when they read it in the silent caverns of their cerebelum suddenly makes perfect sense when they hear it read out loud, slowly, with pauses for punctuation and emphasis on key words.

Pointers:

Take it slow and easy. Read as slowly as you need to in order to think carefully about what you’re reading (but see my notes on speed reading below). I find most students try to read too quickly, especially on knotty GRE and SAT reading passages or dry, academic gristle. They bull their way through only to find themselves having to go back and reread more carefully in order to answer questions. Those of us in the know read slowly and carefully so we only have to read it once.

Imagine you’re reading to a group of fifth-graders and you’re trying to make it exciting. Emphasize key words. Pause for commas. Pause longer for colons. Just deciding how it should be read encourages you to uncover the author’s meaning.

When you read orally, you don’t have to be loud; just loud enough. If you were sitting next to me during a GRE or SAT, you would hear me quietly muttering to myself as I read. I can hear myself, but others can’t.

Reread. Was that last sentence confusing? Read it again. Rephrase it, and translate the less clear words into words you understand well.

Comment and argue. Have a running conversation with the author. Do you agree or disagree? What’s their real agenda? Why did they phrase that last line the way they did?

“But what about speed-reading?” you may ask. In speed reading they teach that verbalizing the words–even silently in your head–actually slows you down. Yes. It does. But I’ve found that speed reading is helpful mainly on very straight-forward clear texts when you are just going for capturing facts rather than trying to tease out nuanced arguments and hidden agendas. I do use speed reading for some things, but if I really want to understand and evaluate a grisly piece of science writing or a bony bit of philosophy, I have to slow down and chew thoroughly. You can eat oatmeal fast, but a lobster takes slow steady effort and special tools.

And now we’re back again to focus. This whole process of reading out loud–slowly, steadily, with pauses and emphasis–is interactive. We lose focus when our reading takes on the numbing cadence of a mindless recitation. Mindlessly reading the words in succession is not reading; it’s just a recipe for boredom. Engage with the text by reading aloud in the way I’ve described and focus is no longer a problem.

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Cody Blair has spent over a decade helping students and teachers discover the secrets that make learning simple! His ebook, Secrets Smart Students Know, reveals how the best students use powerful study skills, maximize their memory, avoid procrastination, and maximize their focus to achieve fantastic grades with much less work! Click now to find out more about simple methods to maximize your study skills.

© Cody Blair, All Rights Reserved. You may reprint the above article as long as you include the above bio/resource information in full, including the functioning links. Do not make any changes to the article or bio. If you can't include clickable links, please ask permission to reprint.

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Cody Blair has spent over a decade helping students and teachers discover the secrets that make learning simple! His ebook, Secrets Smart Students Know, reveals how the best students use powerful study skills, maximize their memory, avoid procrastination, and maximize their focus to achieve fantastic grades with much less work! Click now to find out more about simple methods to maximize your study skills.

© Cody Blair, All Rights Reserved. You may reprint the above article as long as you include the above bio/resource information in full, including the functioning links. Do not make any changes to the article or bio. If you can't include clickable links, please ask permission to reprint.

The GRE revised General Test:

• is more aligned with the skills needed to succeed in graduate and business school
• provides more simplicity in distinguishing performance differences between candidates
• is more test-taker friendly for an enhanced test experience

Well, garsh! Who wouldn’t want an “enhanced test experience?” These statements are the standardized-test-world equivalent of “nice personality” in a singles ad. I’m betting the real reason behind the makeover is marketing. Since clear research existed showing the old GRE was about as good at picking out potential grad school divas as Lady Gaga is at choosing an elegant yet refined evening ensemble, ETS was seeking to duck the data. This is much akin to my greet Aunt Dawn (and “greet” refers to the misspelled tattoo on the hairy knuckles of her right hand**) trading in her straining, bedazzled purple sports bra for a camo tube-top and claiming it gives her fresher breath while eliminating unsightly back hair. Any first-year teacher can tell you that gumption, moxie, sticktoitiveness, and plain-old-fashioned sweat have more to do with making an excellent student than knowing the meaning of words like brobdingnangian and mephitic or being able to find the smallest prime number between 121 and 130.

Consider, Good Reader, how can grad schools compare the old GRE scores that some of their applicants will be tendering for admission to the revised GRE scores brought in be others? They must be in some manner equivalent, no? In fact, ETS has been sending grad school admissions peoples (God bless ‘em) tables on how to compare the two. If they’re comparable, how can one be that much better than the other at picking out ideal grad school candidates. IMHO, they cannot.

They’ve even changed the scoring scale to help underscore the vas deferens between the two tests. See the helpful video here. Enjoy the collegiate and vaguely pompous soundscape.

* This device is not actually made by ETS. Perhaps because it actually works.

** The left knuckles spell out “KISSR”.

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Cody Blair has spent over a decade helping students and teachers discover the secrets that make learning simple! His ebook, Secrets Smart Students Know, reveals how the best students use powerful study skills, maximize their memory, avoid procrastination, and maximize their focus to achieve fantastic grades with much less work! Click now to find out more about simple methods to maximize your study skills.

© Cody Blair, All Rights Reserved. You may reprint the above article as long as you include the above bio/resource information in full, including the functioning links. Do not make any changes to the article or bio. If you can't include clickable links, please ask permission to reprint.