Hack Your GPA

By Stephen H. King

Academics causing you grief? Let Dr. Stephen H. King, a 21-year teaching veteran, guide you through the basic "Hacks" to become an A student. Learn to read faster, to write clearer, to spend less time for better results. You'll learn how to write essays with ease, face off against tests like you never have before, and even give perfect presentations! Bonus chapters in this edition cover the SAT and ACT as well as writing the dreaded college essays.

Reviewers say:
"Stephen gets down to your level and explains in easy-to-understand terms the basics of how simple (and even fun!) learning can really be." – Holly A.

"Dr. King uses a whimsical approach in offering guidance that is relatable and more importantly understandable to the student who wants to move past 'I just don't get it' to understanding the whys in education, enabling them to develop the skills that will pay off in their educational endeavors." – Russell M.

"Any student of any age will find Hack Your GPA a painless and entertaining guide to improving their grades – and their process of education." – Donna F.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stephen H. King
• Release date: Jun 26, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370284450

Stephen H. King

Dean by day and writer by night, Stephen H. King grew up being asked whether he was "that Stephen King." "Not the author," he'd say until his writing addiction took hold and made that into a lie. Now he writes and reads and blogs as The Other Stephen King--you know, the one who writes fantasy and science fiction. When he's not writing, he enjoys thinking about writing while going on hikes or long road trips. When he's not thinking about writing, it's usually because he's fishing. Stephen, his wife, and daughter, and two Chihuahuas all live more or less successfully together in Topeka, Kansas.

Book preview

Hack Your GPA

2nd Edition

by Stephen H. King, PhD

Copyright 2018 by Stephen H. King, PhD

Contents

Toward Academic Success

Studying

Papers

Presentations

Taking Tests

Mathematics

Attitude

Study Groups

Standardized Tests

College Applications

Understanding Academics

End Notes

Second Edition Notes

There’s a lot to be said for second editions. They’re usually better than the first edition, for one, and I’d like to believe that this is true of the one you’re currently reading.

So what’s changed? Well, time, for one thing. It’s been quite some time since I penned and revised the book the first time, and the simple fact, made in the chapter on writing essays, is that the longer you go from the initial writing to the current revision, the better the final product. So—better in the general case.

Here’s the big change, though: I took that whole first chapter out and replaced it. It was originally designed to set a positive stage for the whole book, and it did that for me. My editor and several of my beta readers thought it failed at setting the right tone, though. And, you know what? They were right. My readers, my students, told me so, and to them I’ve always listened. So—yes, I’ll say it, I was wrong.

Why am I writing this way about my own failure? I think it’s good, in an academic success book, to acknowledge one of the core ideas of academic success: specifically, that other people often know better than you do, and therefore you should listen to them. That doesn’t mean assuming that everyone else is right and you’re wrong, certainly, but if someone else has a different opinion on something than you do, sometimes—often—it’s amazingly enlightening to find out why.

So there it is, I wiped the old first chapter out and added a new one. The old chapter, with its original content, is still available at the end of this.

Oh, and due to popular demand I added a whole new chapter on everybody’s favorite subject: mathematics. Yay!

So, without further adieu, here it is: the Second Edition of Hack Your GPA.

Introduction

Hello, class. I am Doctor King, and I will be your professor for this course.

Nah, just kidding. Call me Stephen, for one thing—no, really, I’ve been called Doctor King plenty, and this is neither the time nor the place for that. For another, this isn’t intended to be a course with a professor. I’m here to guide you through the process of Hacking your GPA.

Seriously, though, that first line is how it often sounds as a new class begins, right?

Not here.

Not now.

Not me.

I should point out that this book contains no actual hacking tips, at least not in the computer sense. A quick Internet search on the phrase turns up all sorts of videos about doing things which are illegal, or perhaps just unethical, in order to change your grades in the system without actually changing anything about the way you earn them. If that’s what you’re looking for, you won’t find it here.

Nor will you find a well-researched, well-cited tome on pedagogy. Those already exist, and if that mattered to you, you’d already be reading them. I struggled at first; the Doctor in me wanted to make sure to put in appropriate footnotes, endnotes, and citations so that you would know where I got my information—to prove that it’s real, that it’s legit, and to be honest, that’s just how we’re taught to do things in doctoral programs. But then I realized that I’m not writing this for teachers or for parents or for other Doctors. I’m writing this for you. If you’d like some of my sources, let me know; my contact information is at the end of this book.

If, instead, you want to tell me what a difference this book made, please drop me a line. That’s the kind of thing writers live for.

In this book, though, no, you will not find any citations, because you do not need them to be an A student.

So…. What will you find here, in the pages of this book? Well, I’ll start with helping you understand the teaching, the learning, and the grading processes, and how those work together—or don’t, sometimes. Then I’ll lay out some simple things you can do that will boost your grades very quickly. But here’s the important part: it’s not just about boosting your grades. By the time we’re done, I want you to be an A student, but I also want you to walk away from those spectacular grades with a solid understanding of what you just learned.

Is that what you want, too? Good; keep reading.

We’ll start right now, right here in the Introduction. This sounds hokey, but it’s not. The first thing you have to do is to start thinking about yourself as an A student. Following my simple steps, you’ll ratchet your way up the grade scales and start earning As. And the best part for you, I think, is that you’ll be able to do it without much more work than you were already doing.

I’m serious. Anybody can be an A student.

And who knows? It might actually become fun.

Nah, just kidding. I’m pretty sure that it will actually become fun.

How do I know? Well, first, I went through this metamorphosis myself, figuring it out on my own as I went. I entered my high school sophomore year with a solid history of Bs and Cs. Somewhere around that time I decided I wanted to attend a service academy, for the prestige and for the service to the nation, as well as for the simple fact that my family couldn’t afford much else. The problem was, C students are not generally sent invitations to join the plebe class at any of the service academies, much less the venerable old West Point. So I Hacked my GPA, the same way I’m going to teach you, and graduated ninth in a class of about 800, my honors-inflated GPA well above a 4.0, my next academic step on the bank of the Hudson River at the United States Military Academy.

Four years later I graduated from West Point on the overall Dean’s List, having earned dual majors in physics and electronics. I served a glorious, if shorter than I’d originally expected, time in the Army, and then ended up in grad school, where I forgot everything I’d learned and promptly failed out. I did it in record time, too; I’ll never forget standing in the Dean’s office mid-way through my second semester, being treated to a one-way lecture that there just wasn’t any way at that point to improve my grades enough to make a difference.

I was done.

I was crushed.

I went into teaching. Not immediately; first, I had a short career as an IT worker and contractor. Let’s face it, pulling cables is a hard way to make a living, particularly when you don’t get any sort of standard benefits, and so I took a job teaching day classes and soon found myself a faculty member at a local technical college. I also enrolled in a different grad school, having finally remembered my own lessons, and soon I graduated with an MBA in Telecommunications Management and an honors cord around my neck. Very quickly thereafter I enrolled in a doctoral program, earning a PhD in education much the same way.

Hence, the Doctor in Doctor King. My DC (Doctor of Chiropractic) friend and I go back and forth on which of us is the real doctor, but that’s irrelevant to this book. My doctorate is in figuring out what it is that helps you succeed in the classroom.

I’ve been a high school and college educator for 21 years at this point. I’ve taught IT, and I’ve taught math and science also, and for eleven years as a dean I’ve taught teaching skills to teachers and college success courses to students just like you.

I should add that they’ve been successful, those students. It’s more to their own credit than mine, yet I still, regularly and frequently, hear their news and rejoice. Tens of thousands of men and women have joined the work force or improved their standing therein and prospered thanks to their own efforts—and, I admit, mine. Many I still associate with through social media, and nearly every week or month I am given the pleasant opportunity to rejoice in another rung on the ladder for someone.

Sounds like I know what I’m doing, right?

So, question for you: do you want to languish in classrooms, working harder than you really need to for success, or worse, joining a sea of mediocre students headed toward becoming mediocre graduates who take their mediocre place in a critical world that really doesn’t care whose fault it was that they were mediocre learners?

Or do you want to Hack your GPA and love learning while earning As?

Because anybody can be an A student.

You ready to get started?

Let’s go.

Part I: Toward Academic Success

(You CAN Be An A Student!)

So, you want to be successful in school, right?

Come on, just say yes. You wouldn’t be reading this if you didn’t, no matter how cool no might feel, no matter how frustrated or turned off you’ve been with school so far. Trust me, you wouldn’t be the first to go from no to yes to wow, I didn’t know how simple this was rapidly using the processes I’ve set out in this book. Processes, I should add, that we’ll get to in just a moment.

First, though, we have to start out with some basics.

Hack #1: Your teachers are on your side.

Look, I’ve been educating people for well over two decades. Half of that, I’ve been educating educators. Training the trainers. Teaching teachers. No matter how you put it, I