Is it possible to have above a 4.0 in college

Will it go up to at least a 3. I only took one honors class this year and my final grade was a Next year, I'll be taking two honors classes and one AP.

I want to increase my GPA to at least a 3. Or at least big average schools like NYU. Even though I had a 3. Thank you so much!! By the way, does a GPA count both semesters or does it depend on your final grades?

GPAs follow the same rounding rules as regular numbers, so anything at a 3. You're not quite there right now, but you're close enough that slightly better grades as a junior would get you there. Likewise, you would need to raise your GPA to a 3.

As for how easy that is to do, remember, a GPA is an average, which means that the closer you get to an upper or lower boundary 4. I'm going to do the math for you, but skip to the end if you want the short answer. To give an example, say you have six Bs and four As. GPA works by assigning a number to a letter grade, and then averaging those numbers—an A is a 4.

If I then add 3 As to that, we now have 6 3. If I add 3 more As to that, then it's 6 3. Because we're getting closer to a 4. Colleges care whether you pushed yourself in high school, so aim for harder courses even if it means risking the occasional B on your transcript.

To boost your GPA, instead of taking easier classes, focus on collecting easy points. For example, if you have a teacher who awards points for students who turn in assignments on time, make sure you are not submitting homework late. If your P.

A lot of intelligent students push hard in AP courses only to miss out on these points, which are easier to collect.

Instead, they consider GPAs in the context of your school. They may sometimes even use their own system to relativize GPAs, taking school and class difficulty into account. Rather than aim for a certain GPA, you should strive to be one of the top students relative to others in your high school.

As a general rule, the more competitive the school, the higher the GPA you need. Once you enter the realm of the Top 10 schools and the Ivy League, you can safely assume most applicants have a near-perfect 4.

If these selective colleges are on your college list, you should aim for the highest grades in the most challenging classes.

Want to know more about your GPA and how it impacts your chances of acceptance? Sign up for your free CollegeVine account to see how your GPA stacks up against that of other applicants to your dream school. Calculate your acceptance chances. What is my GPA and how do I calculate it? In a regular class, if I earn… My grade point s for the class is… A 4. What is the highest GPA Possible? What is an Average GPA? Teachers will collectively spend thousands of hours teaching you from their curricula but rarely will they show you how to strategize your coursework and get better grades.

This guide contains all the advice I wish I knew but had to figure out myself the hard way. If you earnestly apply most of the concepts here, I am certain that you will have a much higher chance of academic success. In this guide, the 4. I took a pretty advanced course load, but it wasn't the most extreme course load possible. I don't think this is necessary, since you'll do a lot better in college admissions if you spend the extra time exploring your interests and developing deep extracurriculars.

These two also happened to be senior-year classes, meaning I was probably hit by senioritis. I know a perfect 4. It shouldn't be. Again, a 4. You can take half the number of these AP courses and still get into an Ivy League school. I know this because of my wide experience with students and from seeing a lot of resumes from Ivy League applicants when hiring for my company.

This ambition led to some stressful situations wherein I was deathly afraid of getting an A-, especially when the teacher's grading was incomprehensible. I know this can sound obsessive, and, as I'll mention below, I recommend most students avoid feeling this obsessive. But I'm just being honest and reporting my own experience for your benefit. This guide contains every important strategy I used to maintain a perfect 4. I strongly suggest you read through this entire guide.

At the very least, if you already have a solid foundation, you'll pick up some tips that might improve your coursework. But I'm hoping that I'll dramatically change how you view your learning, how you're spending your time every day, and how you're playing the entire admissions game. If you want a 4.

Before we begin, I need to get a few things out of the way. Bear with me because I'm going to anticipate common objections you might have that can affect how you interpret my advice. If you're looking for shortcuts or the academic equivalent of a "get rich quick" scheme, you won't find it here. I won't sugarcoat it—taking an advanced course load and getting great grades will take a lot of hard work.

I'm a very straightforward person, and I speak my mind. This means that some advice might rub you the wrong way. If that's the case, try to focus on the bigger picture and on the advice you do like. I don't want you to throw the baby out with the bathwater just because you think I'm a jerk. My focus is on helping you do better, and one of the best ways is to share my experiences honestly, warts and all.

I did indeed go through a lot of stress in high school and put in a ton of effort. I think I was obsessive about achievement and have a high capacity for mental pain, and I happen to love working hard.

I don't think it's optimal for most students to do what I did and feel what I felt, and I'll explicitly point this out at places. So just because I describe my experience doesn't mean I always condone it for everyone. If you're aiming for a 4.

That said, I want to stress that a 4. You do not need perfect grades and test scores to get into the Ivy League. In fact, the average unweighted self-reported GPA of incoming students at Harvard is 3. Thus, a 4. Do not freak out if you have high college goals and don't already have a perfect GPA. It's nowhere near the end of the world. I explain more about why in my guide to getting into Harvard. The 4. Ideally, you'll take difficult courses and excel in them. But if you have to make a tradeoff, I'd lean toward the more difficult courses; a letter grade of a B in an AP class is better than an A in a regular class.

Despite the title of this guide, the concepts are widely applicable to GPAs in all ranges. Even if you're not aiming strictly for a 4. You can use all the strategies here to improve your grades and raise your GPA. This is geared toward high school students, but for readers currently in college, the concepts apply equally to you and often even more so since you don't have as much parental structure over your work.

This guide targets high-achieving students who want to aim for academic success and push themselves to be better. As weird as it sounds, this is not the stance everyone should take. Yes, I know how stressed out students are these days about getting into college. No, I don't think everyone should feel as though they need to get into Stanford.

Everyone has different academic goals, and this guide isn't for everyone. I don't think everyone should aim for the toughest course load and perfect grades. Not enough students and families make decisions for personal happiness and are in a state of constant stress, especially if they always feel as if they're not doing enough.

This can have bad long-term consequences. In fact, applying the advice below should actually make your academic life easier because you're spending your time more effectively. That said, I do believe there are huge benefits to academic success. Not only does it lead to obvious benefits like better colleges and more rewarding careers, but it also trains fundamental skills that are applicable to improving the rest of your life. When I was in high school, I knew I wanted to get into a top school like Harvard, and I knew I was willing to endure the sacrifices and pain to get there.

I cared deeply about my academic success and I constantly pushed myself to get better. If this sounds like you and you honestly want to get a 4. Yes, I know there are other things in life that are more important than getting into the best college. But I also know it's a valuable goal for many of you, so I'm orienting this guide toward that.

When you hear me say, "Do this to improve your college application," you should read this as, "Do this if college admissions is an important goal to you. Finally, I co-founded a company called PrepScholar. While you do not need to buy a full prep program to get a great score, I believe PrepScholar is the best SAT program available right now, especially if you find it hard to organize your prep and don't know what to study.

In any case, the fact that I run a test-prep company doesn't really affect my advice below. I hope you're still with me and that the above cleared up some concerns you had coming into this article. Now, let's get started. To understand how colleges think, it's important to put yourself in their shoes. I explain this in more detail in my guide on getting into Harvard and the Ivy League. In short, colleges want to admit students who are going to change the world.

But how do you predict who's going to change the world when applicants are just years old? By using their past achievement as a predictor of future achievement.

Admissions offices at colleges do a lot of research on what types of students they admit and how to predict which students are going to be most successful. Often in these studies, high school coursework has one of the strongest correlations with college grades.

The Dean of Admissions at Harvard has stated the following about the admissions process:. The SAT and ACT have the next strongest correlation, but this too is not surprising because they have a strong correlation with high school grades.

This isn't very surprising. It takes a lot of skill and effort to excel with a demanding high school course load. The qualities that bring success in high school—curiosity, motivation, hard work, good planning, time management, control of your own psychology—are likely to lead to success in both college and your career.

These are all qualities I'm going to cover in this guide. As you can see, your high school coursework is one of the most important pieces of your college application. This is equivalent to a full-time job! Learning is your job. But instead of building a house, you're building your future.

Finally, just to beat a dead horse, here are snippets from admissions offices at top colleges on the importance of coursework in college applications:. But it is hard to conceive of a situation in which the appearance or absence of any one particular class on a transcript would determine the applicant's outcome When the admissions committee looks at your transcript, it will not focus on whether you have taken any specific course. It will be far more interested to see that you have challenged yourself with difficult coursework, and have done well.

Although schools provide different opportunities, students should pursue the most demanding college-preparatory program available, consistent with each student's readiness for particular fields of study.

The rigor of the courses you've taken, the quality of your grades and the consistency with which you've worked over four years give us the clearest indication of how well you will do at Amherst. We strongly recommend taking advantage of honors and advanced placement coursework when available.

Many competitive applicants often go beyond the minimum recommended program. Once again, don't get the wrong idea. Says Stanford on this subject,. In essence, colleges by no means want to promote unhealthy obsession over racking up AP courses, especially if you're not interested in the material.

However, if you can ace the most advanced course load available to you and build a strong application, you're at the level that the best colleges are looking for. Harvard University. As I mentioned at the beginning, this is not a guide in which I teach you actual math or writing content.

This is a high-level strategy and planning guide meant to give you the right mindset and practices for achieving academic success. I see this as the foundation on which you build your high school career. Just like in construction, if you have a weak foundation, your building will crumble, no matter how much effort you put into it. Build on a strong foundation, and you'll find studying far easier and more effective. I've worked with a lot of students who see academic success purely as a content-mastery-and-brute-force problem—try hard enough to master the content and put in enough hours, and you'll do better.

Unfortunately, if they're learning the wrong way or spending time on stuff that's not actually effective, they'll see quickly that their hard work is being wasted. Here's what we'll cover in broad strokes. Each layer builds on the next and we'll go from high to low level:. Let's start at the highest level. We can help. PrepScholar Admissions is the world's best admissions consulting service.

We combine world-class admissions counselors with our data-driven, proprietary admissions strategies. We've overseen thousands of students get into their top choice schools , from state colleges to the Ivy League. We know what kinds of students colleges want to admit. We want to get you admitted to your dream schools. Learn more about PrepScholar Admissions to maximize your chance of getting in. The most fundamental thing you need to control is your own psychology.

You need to believe that you're capable of improving, and you need to be motivated to work hard. If you lack these two insights, you won't be able to put in the effort to achieve your goals, and you'll be crippled by small setbacks. If you strongly agree with even one of these statements, you have a critical problem with your psychology. You'll find it very hard to improve from your current situation because, deep down, you basically believe that you can't improve what you were born with.

Every setback will pound you down, and you'll find it hard to make progress. You're not alone. A lot of people, students and adults alike, believe intelligence is fixed: "People are just born smarter than others, and however smart you are now is how smart you'll be from here on out.

This is tempting to believe because your observations of the world seem to fit this idea. The smart kid at your school just always seems to ace everything without breaking a sweat, and she's always been that way. In contrast, you might have tried really hard in a class but ended up with a B.

Or you might never have been good at math, so improving your math grades seems impossible. A belief in a fixed intelligence has problems whether you believe you're smart or not. If you don't believe you're intelligent, then you've accepted that you'll never be intelligent. If you're bad at writing, you'll always just be bad at writing.

People are "right-brained" or "left-brained," so of course they'll do worse in classes they're not good at! While people definitely can have different talents, too often this kind of thinking is used to justify poor performance without thinking hard enough about how to actually improve. Here's the trap—let's say you do poorly on something, like a math test. If you believe your talent is fixed, your excuse will be that you're bad and you'll always be bad.

You won't seriously consider the fact that you can actually improve. You won't think hard about how you failed and what you need to change in order to stop failing. I'm using "fail" often here and it might sound intense to you. The way I think about it, if you want an A, then a B is a failure.

You can't compromise this because you risk sliding into complacency and lowering your goals. So I'll continue using "fail" throughout this guide even though it usually means something far less severe than literally failing a class.

This trap is easy to fall into because it's easier to blame something out of your control an idea that you were born with, talent or not than to admit that you just didn't work hard or effectively enough to meet your goal. This isn't just relevant for low-performing students—it's a problem for high performers, too. High-achieving students often fall into a trap wherein they take failures too hard as a personal blow to their egos. They've been praised as smart from childhood and academics comes naturally to them.

When they first encounter failure, they don't know how to react. If you believe that classwork is about intelligence, and you believe your intelligence is high but fixed, then a failure in classwork will seem unsolvable. Every mistake and failed test will be a crushing blow to your ego, and you'll doubt yourself constantly and wonder if you're doing things right.

I think this is partly why students who excel in high school end up floundering in college where classes are a lot more demanding and they don't have the structure of high school and parenting. The antidote to both problems is to adopt a growth mindset.

This idea was developed by Carol Dweck, a psychology professor at Stanford, after decades of studying learners. Here's what she says :. They have a certain amount and that's that, and then their goal becomes to look smart all the time and never look dumb.

In a growth mindset students understand that their talents and abilities can be developed through effort, good teaching and persistence. They don't necessarily think everyone's the same or anyone can be Einstein, but they believe everyone can get smarter if they work at it. In short, intelligence can be developed and trained.

You can get better and smarter. No matter how good you think you are now, your job is to get better and improve constantly.

Your job is to use your experiences and failures to do better next time—not to accept your failures for what they are. This idea comes from research. In a study , Dweck followed students transitioning from elementary school to junior high, when the material gets more challenging and the grading stricter. They wanted to see how the students' mindsets fixed or growth affected their math grades.

At the beginning of the project, students were surveyed to gauge their perspectives on learning and mindset. One question asked whether they agreed or disagreed with the idea that your intelligence is something very basic about you that you can't really change just like I asked you at the beginning of this section.

Students with a growth mindset felt that hard work led to improvement. In response to a bad grade, growth-mindset students wanted to work harder or try different strategies. In contrast, students with a fixed mindset believed that smart people didn't need to work hard to do well. When confronted with bad grades, students with fixed mindsets said they would study less in the future and attributed it to their own lack of ability.

At the start of junior high, students in both groups showed comparable math test scores. But as the math got harder, a gap appeared— students with a growth mindset showed growth in test scores, while those with a fixed mindset slumped. Here's a model of how students with strong growth mindsets compare with those with strong fixed mindsets over a span of two years:.

Imagine how this difference scales over 20 years of your life, from elementary school to college and eventually your career. The difference in the final result can be astounding. This is why there's a recent movement for parents and teachers to stop calling kids smart.

Adults think they're encouraging children with praise, but really they're promoting a fixed mindset. If you believe your success is due to intelligence and not hard work, then when you encounter failure, you'll blame your intelligence and not your lack of hard work.

Having a growth mindset is important because you will inevitably face challenges in your classwork. You will do much worse on a biology test than you expected. You'll get an essay back with a lot of red marks saying you just didn't get it. It'll feel terrible. I'd know—despite my perfect grades, I was nowhere close to acing every single assignment and test. But after you give yourself time to grieve, you need to analyze exactly what you did and figure out what went wrong.

Your actions led to this subpar result, and you need to change your actions to improve your result. This all starts with believing that you're capable of getting better. If you don't accept this, you'll just throw up your hands and resign yourself to your fate, which is basically like treating every class like a lottery.

Below, I'll talk more about how to use feedback to reflect on your study strategy and improve. The idea of a growth mindset is important throughout all of life, really. Whether you're learning how to ski or trying to build stronger friendships, the belief that you're capable of improving gives you the fuel to analyze your shortcomings objectively and actually try to improve them. The alternative is to accept that you are now as good as you will ever be, and that whatever level you're at is how you'll stay for the rest of your life.

That sounds pretty lame to me. If you said yes to any points in the pop quiz above, you're more likely to be operating in a fixed mindset. It's not likely you'll change this immediately since you've believed in a fixed mindset for many years. Note that this isn't saying everyone can be an Albert Einstein or a Kobe Bryant. But you can get a lot closer than you think. After you adopt a mindset change, the important steps are to apply the concepts to your work and continue believing in them. We'll spend a lot more time below explaining how to use feedback to improve your studying.

If you'd like to read more about the growth mindset, check out this article by Dweck or her book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. For some fun examples, here's a video of someone who learns to dance over a year with focused practice:. If a year seems like a lot of time, here's a video of a dude who learns to kickflip in a little more than five hours:. If you've never been a natural writer, you can learn to write effectively. I'm dwelling on this point because it's so critical to breaking free from constraints that you place on yourself now.

You can improve from where you are, and you can have a lifetime of growth. We've already covered how top colleges consider coursework one of the most important pieces of college applications. These schools expect you to take a challenging course load with some of the hardest courses offered at your school often AP or IB classes. You'll also have to do this while balancing extracurriculars, test prep, a social life, and your own sanity.

This means that your course load is going to be challenging, and your schedule will be demanding. It will take a serious amount of work to excel in every single class, and sometimes it will feel like you're just putting out new fires as fast as you can. I probably spent at least an average of four hours a day on homework including weekends on projects and studying.

This would increase dramatically when finals and AP exams came around. There's no way around this. The smartest kid at your school might seem to just breeze through life and get straight As without breaking a sweat. If she enjoys having this reputation, she might even actively foster it. The reality, however, is likely that this "perfect student" is busting her ass every day. She might just hide it well or doesn't really treat it like work, and so doesn't seem to be breaking a sweat.

If you really enjoy learning, then working hard on schoolwork won't be nearly as painful. If you're used to a comfortable life and schedule with many hours of free time every day, you'll probably have to start making tradeoffs in other areas of your life. If you care about highly competitive college admissions, you will need to orient your life toward that.

This usually means less personal relaxation or social time and cutting out an extracurricular that isn't adding to your application. Again, I'm not saying you have to do this. Not every student should aim for top colleges and the most rigorous course load possible. But it's a meaningful goal and one that's important to a lot of you, so I'm just being real about what it takes.

It will take effective strategies to understand where to spend your limited time to get the maximum result. But the rewards are worth it, and if you learn these skills, you'll be stronger in the rest of your life. We're going to talk about each of these aspects below.

For pretty much all ambitious students, high school coursework is going to be a grind. I'm not saying that learning isn't fun, but inevitably you'll have to do assignments you don't care about, sit in class listening to profoundly dull teachers, and prepare for exams that aren't fun.

All of this is going to take time and mental energy to drive through the most painful parts. Having motivation makes a big difference in how hard you work and how strongly you persist through difficulty. It turns out that there are actually two types of motivation: extrinsic motivation coming from outside and intrinsic motivation coming from within.

One of them is a lot more durable than the other. A common source of extrinsic motivation is parental pressure. If you fail a test, you're grounded. If you don't clean up your room, you have your phone taken away. More positively, if you get an A, maybe your parents buy you that pair of shoes you always wanted. This can definitely work— but only in the short term and not reliably.

While you might do your homework and stop texting for a night, ultimately it leads to frustration and resentment and won't be reliable for long periods of time. Just remember the last time you argued with your parents about something they wanted you to do, like chores or homework. Fear of punishment can be an effective motivator, but it wears off, especially as you get older and more independent.

Ground me, I don't care! If you rely on your parents to keep you motivated and your parents aren't around, you won't work. In contrast, intrinsic motivation comes from within.

It's something you want for yourself—screw what other people think. In the darkest of times, this motivation will drive you forward. When you're tired and would rather watch YouTube, the idea of getting a B will get you out of bed and keep you focused.

When you get a C on your essay, the idea of failure will be unacceptable and you'll have no choice but to question where you fell short and how you can improve in the future.

Research shows that extrinsic motivation, such as rewards, are weak reinforcers in the short run and negative reinforcers in the long run. Dig deep, find something internal you care about, and keep adding fuel to that fire. I want to caution here that you should try to steer away from unhealthy motivations if possible. I was very competitive in high school to the point of being repugnant, and my high school atmosphere overall was pretty toxic. It's better if you can find something positive to encourage you that doesn't make you a jerk.

There's more on intrinsic vs extrinsic motivation here , written for teachers. Up to this point, we've covered really high-level mindset and psychology. I know parts of this sound like hokey motivational speech, but trust me: way more students suffer from these problems than I would like.

Even though schools rarely cover these topics, I think they're the most critical of all. If you don't believe you have the capacity to improve, each failure will cripple you mentally.

If you have nothing to drive you, your work every day will be painful. You need a super solid foundation on which to build your actual learning and study habits.

In order to get a 4. This section goes over how to plan out your study schedule so that you're on track to getting a 4. Let's start with the basics. You need to know early on what classes you're going to take your four years in high school. This will help prepare you mentally for what's to come. Once you make sure you have all the requirements in place, you'll be able to start gathering info on classes to come—and also be able to picture the story you're building for your college applications.

Gear your expected course sequence toward your interests. You don't have to take every single hard class available. Remember what Harvard's admissions office says: "[S]tudents should pursue the most demanding college-preparatory program available, consistent with each student's readiness for particular fields of study" bold emphasis mine. This is useful for colleges to understand what you lean toward.

If you don't know what you're interested in, you can do a general spread of the usual courses. As I suggest in my guide to getting into Harvard , I recommend thinking about what you want your application story to be and deeply exploring specific interests rather than trying to be too well rounded.

Sorry to keep linking to my Harvard guide, but it contains my best admissions advice and resonates strongly with this guide!

This also means that you don't have to play the same game as everyone else. You do not need to take exactly as many AP courses as the top student in your school does. Are you a writer who really wants to showcase this talent in your college application? You don't have to take AP Biology. It might be really difficult and unenjoyable for you, and it will take up hundreds of hours that are far better spent elsewhere that will strengthen your application.

For my business, I interview and hire a lot of Ivy League graduates. Most often it's centered around their core interests. Don't feel pressured to do what your friends are doing or what's generally accepted as right. Finally, make sure you really understand all the prerequisites for each of the advanced courses and plan ahead.

You might have to take summer-school courses—understand how this works and anticipate any issues. A personal example: I wanted to take AP Biology my freshman year, which meant I had to take biology as a summer course after 8th grade. This was unusual and I was only one of two freshmen to do this.

The next year I wanted to take AP Chemistry as a sophomore, which required me to take chemistry in the summer. My high school only had two available classes for chemistry, and they prioritized older students. I didn't get the placement, which meant I had to register at a high school half an hour away and drive back and forth each day thanks, Dad. Another benefit of planning early is that you can start gathering information on courses you'll be taking in future years.

This will prepare you mentally for what's to come and let you structure your life accordingly, like having the right amount of extracurriculars so you can stay afloat. Different schools have different reputations for how courses are run. At my school, AP Biology was seen as a hazing boot camp, requiring hardcore memorization of tiny details. In contrast, AP Physics was really laid-back, even though conceptually I think it's a lot more difficult.

This might be the opposite at other schools. Being able to predict this will help you prepare your life in advance and make sure you know what you're getting into. Also, different teachers have different reputations. One AP Biology teacher at my school was known for being excellent—he explained concepts clearly, was enthusiastic, and showed students the bigger picture.

The other teacher was unanimously considered one of the worst teachers at our school. I had the latter fun story on this later.

Even though you might not have control over which teacher you get, you'll be able to gauge how much variation there will be in your future. There is one limitation in every human's life, from Bill Gates' and Mark Zuckerberg's to yours and mine. It's the time you have per day. Everyone has only 24 hours in a day, and it's up to you to get the most out of each day. If you're aiming for a top college, building a strong application will likely take up almost all your free time.

Roughly speaking, out of 24 hours in a weekday, you have eight hours for school and transit which are mandatory , eight hours for life outside of school, and eight hours for sleep. And I do recommend you get sleep—more on that later. Of the eight hours you have outside of school, you might need four hours every day to get through your homework and another two for your extracurriculars. This gives you just two hours of free time. Weekends remove the eight hours of schooling but likely replace it with more studying, test prep, and extracurriculars.

When charted like this, it's clear that you have a strictly limited amount of time every day to get through what you need to get through. Furthermore, if you're able to save an hour every day, you'll be able to get an extra hours per year.

This is a massive amount of time you can use to improve your grades or make serious progress on an extracurricular. They'll be strongly motivated to do well and often passionate about what they're doing. Remember what we discussed regarding intrinsic motivation. This is a staggering amount. We'll talk more about time management below, but there are two high-level points I'd like to make now. Notice how at the very beginning, a little bit of effort makes a big impact on results.

After a while, each additional unit of effort barely moves the needle on output. Thus "diminishing marginal returns. A common time drain is social time or hanging out. If you haven't seen your friends all day, then the first 10 minutes you see them are going to be super exciting.

You'll share the latest news and gossip and find out more about each other's lives. By the end of the first hour, though, you'll often run out of things to talk about. This is where awkward silences might start settling in and people start focusing on their phones.

By the end of the third hour, you're probably in a zombie-like state in which you're hanging out but not really doing anything in particular. You could have packed things up two and a half hours ago and spent the rest of that time doing something more effective. The same goes for texting, Snapchat, Netflix, and browsing the internet, as far as your happiness is concerned. The first little bit goes a long way, but the rest of the time doesn't add all that much.

The trap here is that all these activities are pretty pleasant and pain-free compared to running a marathon or studying. Like a warm blanket in winter, they're easy to get lost in and hard to escape from. It takes real discipline and willpower to break out of that trap and do hard things like study for a test.

Surprisingly, diminishing returns applies equally to classwork. There really is a point at which studying more isn't going to raise your score and you're just obsessing for no real reason.