What makes a bad student

8 Bad Habits Successful Students Don’t Have… And How to Avoid Them

About the Author
Stephanie Allen read Classics and English at St Hugh’s College, Oxford, and is currently researching a PhD in Early Modern Academic Drama at the University of Fribourg.
Top tips on how to be less like you and more like the brain-boxes whose grades we all envy.

1) Plan to work right up to a deadline

We last-minute people are badly misunderstood. Over the course of my million-year-long career as a student, I’ve seen hundreds of teacherly, tutorly and fellow-studently eyebrows raised so high they disappear as I accidentally let slip that yes, I did finish writing that essay twenty minutes before the deadline and hope it’d be OK without a proof-read; yes, I did go to bed with 500 words written and plan to write another 2000 between 3 and 9 am; yes, I did think the bus into town would be a great place to write a bibliography. To those who don’t understand it, last-minuteness looks like laziness, disorganisation and often carelessness. It isn’t, really, of course – it’s more like a completely different habit of mind, whereby you need the pressure of a limited amount of time, and plan to use all the available time up until a deadline for work. You end up working just as hard as everyone else, but later, and often more frantically.

The problem is, even though being last-minute does not translate to being lazy or disorganised, it can and does get you into trouble. I’ve got examples too numerous to mention of times when I’ve ended up doing badly on something I should have nailed, because I planned to do far too much, too late. Like the time I decided to radically re-structure a 10,000 word essay the day before it was due and with 2,000 words still to write – and didn’t end up having time to finish the references. Or the time I was going to finish writing a piece of coursework on the morning it was due, and then woke up with a migraine and couldn’t do anything. Or the hundreds of times I’ve handed things in full of spelling mistakes that I was too tired to see after staying up all night.
If you’re a last-minute person reading this and cringing inwardly over all the terrible things you’ve handed in because it’s all gone to pot at the very last moment – this trick can help. Set yourself a deadline of 9am on the day before your work is due, to have something that you could hand in. It doesn’t have to be perfect, but it has to be complete – written all the way to the end, conclusion and all, referenced and formatted. If that means staying up late, or getting up super early – so be it. Make changes on the day before if you need to, but to a completed product that’s ready to go.

2) Use caffeine to answer all problems

One cup of coffee, or even Red Bull in truly desperate times, can work wonders at sharpening your thinking and helping you power through great swathes of work. But any more won’t make much of a difference, and instead will turn you into a jittery, shakey, unfocused, ill mess. Too much caffeine is also bad for your heart, and disrupts your sleep patterns.
If you find it hard to focus, or sometimes feel like you’re operating from behind a brick wall of tiredness, try getting more exercise – it’s been scientifically proven again and again that getting your heart rate up for half an hour a few times a week does wonders for mood, sleep and concentration.

3) Stay up all night working

The evil sister of working until the last minute and overdosing on coffee is the all-nighter, my least favourite of all study crutches. We’ve all done them; I’ve done probably hundreds in my time. Once there was a time I watched the sun come up, go down, come up, and go down again during a single session in the library (admittedly, this was in winter, when the sun was only up for about seven hours a day – but it was still a very depressing experience).

There’s always the danger you won’t manage to stay awake long enough to hand your work in.

All-nighters always seem like a brilliant idea at about six p.m. on the day before you do them: you’ll gain an extra twelve hours you wouldn’t normally have, without distractions, and you’ll probably have to eat loads of junk food and drink gallons of fizzy drinks to stay awake. And in fact, if you’re going to stay up all night you can probably sneak off for a bit of a break now… At about 9pm, once you’ve eaten all your snacks and had a good long break, and started realise quite how much you’ve got to do, and how much you’d rather be doing almost anything else, the sense of smug resolution starts to disappear. By 12, after the third coffee, you might feel OK again – but by 2, your head positively throbs and your eyes are so itchy and bloodshot they’re basically half-closed. And by 4, you’re so light-headed with tiredness and hunger that you can barely read the words you’ve already written, let alone think of new ones. When you read your work back the next day, when it’s already too late, you’re horrified at the amount of typos, spelling mistakes and 6am sentences that just don’t make sense criss-crossing your page. That’s if you can work the next day, that is – staying up all night turns me into a zombie for two days at the very least.
Of course, they’re sometimes inevitable – when a piece of work takes longer than it should, or something goes wrong at the last minute. But unless you’re one of those mad nocturnal bat-people who sleep all day and do their best work at 3am, don’t plan or rely on all-nighters. They’re thoroughly horrible and definitely don’t produce good work.

4) Sit on social networking sites while studying

Hey, we all do it – when we’ve got a big piece of work to do, that we know will require more than a couple of hours’ concentration and effort, we want to make the process as fun as possible. And there are lots of different ways of doing this: whether it’s planning to meet people for coffees or lunches to break the day up; sitting and reading through notes in the sunshine rather than the library; going to the library with a friend and stopping work every few minutes to have a chat; or sitting with Facebook or Twitter open while we work, and simultaneously conducting our social and academic life from the same desk.
The last two ways of getting round work are, in my experience, always a mistake. To garble some pop-science, our brains function on two different levels. The first level, the way we normally think, is fast, instinctive and emotional – always prompting us to act in response to our surroundings, this is the brain that helps us get through the day without being knocked over by a car or eaten by a lion. But the human mind can also function in a slower, more deliberative and logical way – taking its time over decisions in order to reach stronger answers and, crucially, allowing for creative thought. This is the system of thinking we should aim to employ when working, whether it’s on a piece of writing or a set of maths problems: the slow, logical, creative brain. And in order to make the switch to this system, it’s crucial to shut out the distractions, the little things that trigger our instinctive reactions.
Sitting with friends or on Facebook might seem like way to make working less stressful and more fun, but it’ll make it harder to focus and really think through a problem. It will mean that those problems take longer to solve, and the solutions end up being of a worse quality. Try working alone, without distractions, for three- or four-hour bursts and you’ll be astonished how much you get done, how much better your work is and how much more time you have left for the things you really want to do.

5) Work in their bedrooms

Working in your room always seems like a great idea at first: it’s nice and cosy, there’s easy access to tea and snacks and you don’t even have to get dressed. But I find that it’s a recipe for distraction: whether it’s the clarion call of the delicious treats in the fridge prompting a break every five minutes, the lure of the television or the realisation that I really do desperately need to do laundry this very instant, I always find reasons to distract myself at home. And what’s more, a day cooped up in a single room without achieving much or seeing anyone can leave you feeling lonely and stressed and mean that it’s difficult to switch off and relax in the same room at the end of the day. No – the library is the way to go.

6) Ignore problems

When you don’t understand or you can’t get the hang of something, and you haven’t got a clue even how to begin, it can feel like you’re the only person in the world who just doesn’t get it. I used to sit in Science and Maths lessons for weeks on end without having a clue what was going on, copying the occasional thing down just to look like I was listening, lost in daydreams of bashing the girl next to me (who used to put her hand up to answer every single question) very hard over the head with my graphical calculator, and sniggering unpleasantly if she ever got a question wrong.
The thing I didn’t understand in those dark Sciencey days was that no matter how bright or hard-working, everyone struggles with topics or concepts from time to time. Absolutely no one understands absolutely everything the first time they hear it; what makes a really successful student is how they deal with things they find difficult. Rather than ignoring tough topics, focusing on what they like and declaring sadly that they ‘just don’t have a mathsy brain’, top students identify problems and deal with them early. If they don’t get something in class, they go home that day and read through their notes, a text book or their syllabus; they ask the teacher or a friend to explain it to them again so that the problem doesn’t fester, becoming bigger and more stressful, and meaning that they don’t understand more things later on.

7) Leave work behind in the classroom

When you were younger, listening in class and doing your homework, as well as the odd bit of revision for a test here and there, were probably enough to guarantee that you always did brilliantly. But as you get older and start to specialise, everything suddenly seems to become more and more complex, and teachers and tutors use classes to throw huge amounts of information at you, aiming to cover everything in a short space of time and expecting that you’ll go away and work on things independently.
From your final years at school onwards, it makes a huge difference to your success if you consolidate what you’re learning as you go: shifting from a paradigm of relying on your teacher and classes, to being more independent, and putting in the hours outside of lessons to make sure you understand everything. This sounds scary but actually isn’t too tough if you do it regularly. Spend an hour a day or a few hours at the end of a week reading through the notes you’ve made and relevant sections in your textbooks, jotting down any questions you want to ask, checking anything you don’t understand with your teacher or against the book, and practising anything you find tough. This will not only stop gaps developing in your knowledge as you progress, but will mean that by the time you come to revise, you’ll have great, full notes, and will effectively have revised everything once already!

8) Stress out when they fail

Even the best students mess up sometimes, getting things wrong, making mistakes in tests or handing in pieces of work that totally bomb. But because these students tend to do well, they’re often confident enough to accept occasional failures, taking them in their stride and realising that having written one bad essay, or even a string of them, doesn’t make them incapable of doing well the next time.
If you mess up once, a few times, or even for a whole year, the worst thing you can possibly do is let it knock your confidence and make you stop trying. Instead, tell yourself that you’re just as capable of doing well as anyone else, and ask your teacher for feedback on what the exact problem was and work on rectifying that thing the next time. It might be that you then mess something else up but don’t let this stress you out. Making a mistake and learning a lesson often gives you a better understanding of how to succeed than flukily hitting the jackpot the first time round.
Good luck!

Why Bad Students (Sometimes) Make The Best Students

Hi!

I’m Red-beard The Pirate and I’ve helped thousands of students get killer grades with my book (and I’m even talking about the procrastinators too.)

It takes a special breed of person to thrive in public schools (and most private schools) today.

The qualities that allow students to thrive in school aren’t the qualities that make a great student.

Students that are traditionally “good students” tend to be obedient, laid-back, and polite.

There is nothing wrong with those qualities.

They’re just more appropriate for schooling than learning.

Certain qualities are signs of intelligence despite not being appreciated in school:

Humans didn’t evolve for thousands of years to thrive in a classroom environment.

They evolved to survive in the real world actually solving day to day problems.

Memorizing long lists of random information is useless for that. Remembering locations and important skills is natural.

What schools consider a good student does not make a strong student when it comes to the real world.

This Is What Students Are

Most people think about students in a school context.

The average person spends over a decade in the classroom. School isn’t the only means that can make someone a student.

Students can be self-directed or even mentor directed in a subject.

Heck, students can have no plan for learning and just follow their whims in a particular subject.

When a student is the average good student in school, it says nothing about their potential.

It doesn’t mean they’ll be a good student outside of school.

The same goes for typical bad students.

The qualities that they need to be great students in the real world can lead to struggling in a school environment.

Intelligent students can end up getting shunned and treated like bad students. Of course, that just leads to the student becoming less and less motivated to try and be a good student.

The problem just stacks on itself and some of the smartest students end up getting subpar grades.

What Does A Bad Student Look Like?

There are qualities that traditionally bad student have that actually are signs of intelligence.

Not having these qualities doesn’t mean a person is wrong but having them isn’t wrong either.

These are qualities that are not treated kindly in the average school environment.

Some are attacked.

In those cases, these qualities may not be as visible in the student because the student is hiding it.

Some are qualities that are largely ignored by school. They end up being the qualities most bad students curl up into.

Piercing Skepticism

After decades of education, if a student is still skeptical of what their teachers say, he or she is an unusual student.

Teachers are not the know-all and be-all of their subjects.

They’re human beings.

Sure, teens are getting boosts of new hormones get excessive with their skeptical rebellions but skepticism is something that almost no students at an older age have enough of.

That’s expected in the environment though.

Skepticism is often attacked by teacher equivalents of “because I said so.”

This is often because teachers take it as a sign of disrespect.

Traditional lesson plans don’t leave much room for tangents of a single students whims.

In a classroom of 30 students, this is bound to be a problem at times.

That’s why students are taught to just accept the teacher’s statements as fact.

This skepticism can be catastrophic to a student.

They need to manage it carefully.

Good luck getting good grades when your teachers think you’re an ass. 😛

Laser Focus

I remember looking into my friend’s face in class. His eyes were glazed over. His mouth was open a little. He was staring off so far into space that he seemed caught in another planet’s gravitational pull.

I waved my hand in front of him.

I waved my hand closer in front of him.

He closed his eyes and squeezed them together.

When he opened them he said he was just thinking about something.

I didn’t know this guy well enough to know many things about him but this guy could focus.

It’s not even for completely understandable reasons.

The simple ability to focus on a set of facts is ability enough to solve a problem related to them.

For example, you may not know the correct mathematical procedure to solve a math problem but if you let your brain mull over the details long enough, the secret sometimes just comes to you from plain old logic.

For many different reasons, some students take their focus away from school.

Perhaps they don’t enjoy school.

Maybe they got annoyed by a teacher.

Better yet, they might just have more important things in their life.

When they took their focus away from school, they moved their focus into some other area of their life.

Some bad or good students just let their brains fade in and out of school work. That lets the students learn a little bit from the teacher every now and then.

A student skilled at focusing can ignore the teacher completely.

Their brain says they have better things to focus on.

The better the student is at focusing, the less random teacher stimuli gets stuck in their head.

The less random stimuli they get, the worse their grades end up being.

Impeccable Priorities

Focusing on something other than school can be a sign that the student has thought out priorities.

A student that loves music might want to become a rock musician.

That guy knows that sitting in history class isn’t going to do much good in that career.

This student shows up because they have to. Then he focuses on music.

School doesn’t matter to them.

That’s an effective use of priorities. Whether it is intelligent or not is up for debate.

By focusing on what you’re motivated to do you can make significantly more progress in less time.

Many students never learn how to use priorities for school.

School may be a top priority for the student.

It may just be because they’ve been doing what they’ve been told.

The student has no evidence that it is important.

The student just does what they’re told in hopes to survive another day.

This is a skill that, when a student is interested in school, can lead to great grades without too much effort.

World Class Motivation

The biggest problem that many bad students have when it comes to school is motivation in school.

They can’t convince themselves to care enough to actually put effort into their grades.

If you put these students in a situation that they’re actually interested in learning in then their results improve.

What is it that’s going to get you to do what you need to do? If you don’t see the beauty in doing what you need to do then you probably won’t do it.

Of course, if you are that bad student, then there are things you can do to get yourself more motivated for school.

One of them is to start ignoring most of the clichés the schools throw at you.

If they were the ones to demotivate you, don’t expect them to remotivate you. They failed.

You may need to find some completely different reason.

That’s something that depends on you.

Sometimes effectiveness can massively improve your motivation.

Learning is a long and complicated process but memorizing information is quick and easy.

It’s a lot easier to get motivated to spend a few minutes memorizing than a few hours studying.

If you are a good student, remember that the things that make you skilled in school won’t make you skilled in life.

Sure, you can keep up your polite acceptance to help you get through school.

When you get out of that environment, everything is going to change.

Leave Procrastination In The Dust! Never EVER let it stop you again.

Doing stuff is easy – sometimes, right?

You only procrastinate the stuff that sucks. You don’t say, “Ahhh… I’ll read that text from my crush later.” Nope. Now… Any pause is intentional and coordinated to respond better.

Here is the problem with academics:

You probably think most academic stuff sucks – at least a little. (Especially compared to other things you could be doing.)

And the thing is:

FORCING YOURSELF TO STUDY JUST MAKES IT WORSE!

You’re slowly hardening your association of school and being miserable.

You need to create positive associations with academics. You want your brain to be getting hyped up and positive when you’re thinking about studying and giving into this internal oligarchical instinct to force yourself to studying – ain’t helpin’.

Chill the internal dictator for a moment…

A big secret: You need to STOP forcing yourself to study so much.

But, if you’re not forcing yourself then how are you going to see those killer straight-a’s that you’re always pining over?

It’s not difficult but it can sound weird to unfamiliar eyes.

Get your copy of my book about How To Get Happier Straight A’s.

Bad Students: What Happens to Bad Kids in School?

Everyone knows what happens to good students. Your parents tell you to study hard because model students get high grades. Your teachers tell you to pay attention if you want to succeed in life.

Of course, not everyone can be shining good students. Students who perform averagely end up getting fairly good futures as well, but receive less of the recognition.

But what about the bad students? The horror stories your parents and teachers may use might seem like a slippery slope, but here’s what happens to bad students.

Bad Students vs. Good Students

How do you determine a bad student from a good one? There are several characteristics to spot a bad student.

Disrupts Classes for No Good Reason

Whether it’s to make a joke or just because they like attention, a bad student will disrupt a class discussion for no good reason. They are the ones who take out their phone in class and then argue that a teacher can’t take your phone when it gets confiscated. They think that their disruption is more important than the lesson at hand. Not only does it disrupt class, but it disrupts other students from learning.

Photo by NeONBRAND on Unsplash

Breaks the Rules

For bad students, rules are optional or are meant to be broken. They are always late to class or skip it entirely, loitering, found attempting to cheat, destroy school property, bully other students, and more.

While some schools do have strict rules, they’re often put in place for everyone’s safety, health, and security. This also serves as an early training period for the rules students will soon have to follow after they graduate. A bad student simply does not care.

Does Not Respect Others

They do not respect their fellow students or teachers. A good student can have quarrels with other students and disagree with some teachers, but they understand that they are in a school area and must show a certain amount of decency and respect while in school.

A bad student, on the other hand, shows zero respect for students and teachers. This includes talking back, bullying, not helping out in group projects, and being late to meetings.

No Interest in Learning

A good student fully understands the lesson and isn’t afraid to ask questions. So, does that mean a student with failing grades is automatically a bad student? Not necessarily.

There are a lot of reasons why a student can have failing scores. A student’s personal life at home can affect their performance and mental health. So, a student may want to perform well in school, but their inability to set aside their problems at home can hinder it. That does not make them a bad student.

Poor grades can also be a sign that a student is undergoing a difficult time in school. Maybe they’re having a hard time studying for one class that their ability to concentrate on other classes is also affected. Or perhaps they’ve pulled a Hermione Granger and have bitten off more than they can chew in terms of electives, classes, and extra-curricular activities. It could also be a sign that they’re experiencing social problems at school like bullying. As long as a teacher sees they have a willingness to learn, then they are not a bad student.

A bad student, on the other hand, sees their poor grades and does not think it is a problem worth their attention that they want to solve. They see no reason to try to work harder for a better grade, they don’t recognize there is a problem, and they don’t ask for help. Instead, they try to justify their aloofness (“Who needs physics? I’m not going to be a scientist in the future!”) or take the blame of themselves (“I actually deserve a C- at the very least for that essay but Mrs. Carter just hates me.”).

What Happens to Bad Students

Bad students in high school or any higher learning level may find the effects of their performance affecting them later in life. We can compare this the 2017 Netflix series, American Vandal. In the first season, we’re introduced to Dylan Maxwell, a class clown everyone believes was responsible for a serious vandalism case. It was easy for people to believe he was the culprit because of his actions as a bad student. At the end of the season, his college application was rejected and though he was exonerated from the vandalism went on to commit a vandalism on his own.

While the show was only a mockumentary, you can see how being a bad student led to Dylan’s own fate. Had he been a better student, it’s less likely that the bad stuff that happened to him.

But what could really happen to bad students?

Your Chances As a Prospective Student Look Bad

If you’re a prospective student for a college or university after high school, that institution will be looking at things such as your permanent record, academic record, list of extra-curricular activities, and more.

Glowing records that go beyond the bare minimum required of students are sure to stand out in a sea of college application forms. These are the ones more prestigious schools cherry-pick and offer admission. For example, Harvard University is arguably the most prestigious school in the United States and one of the best in the world. For the class of 2023, there were 43,300 people who sent their college application forms; Only around 2,000 were accepted.

Average college applications are also good, but it won’t really give you a competitive edge in colleges with a cut-off number of students. However, it can still be enough to get you into a good college.

Bad students, however, may have records that are much worse than the average application. There may be no teacher willing to write them a recommendation, and the ones that do may be unwilling to fluff their recommendation and be honest about their performance. Grades-wise, bad students won’t have much to show. And their lack of motivation to do more in extra-curricular activities could negatively affect their application. Thus, they can’t really expect to enter top schools, and the chance of getting into regular colleges and universities may vary.

Your School Reputation May Come Back to Haunt You

I’ve seen a lot of stories about how people return to their hometowns 30 years later and come face-to-face with their bully. Or how a person who bullied them ended up begging for a job in the company they built. Or how business owners refused to hire a person because of their reputation.

When a bad student manages to solidify their reputation as a bad student, it may come back to bite them later in the future. No matter how much they’ve changed, people will remember what they were like. And while change can be genuine, there will be others who won’t believe it and dismiss a former bad student as unreliable or a nusiance.

Uncompetitive Job Prospects

After high school, whether you choose to go to college then look for a job or go straight to looking for work, having both a poor educational record and a poor attitude developed from being a bad student can hinder one’s job prospects.

Some companies look at the school records of applicants. More high-paying jobs look at specifics like grades and skills picked up from extra-curriculars, internships, and part-time jobs. In this case, a bad student cannot stand out from good students and average students and are likely to lose the job to someone with a better report.

And if companies don’t care about school records, they will most likely care about attitude. A company won’t be willing to keep someone with a poor working attitude, something many bad students develop while they are still studying. This includes talking back to superiors, being lazy, and disrupting certain work processes.

The Effects of Bad Job Prospects

A bad educational record, bad reputation, and bad attitude will carry on years after you leave school. This, in turn, can lead to fewer job prospects that aren’t as good as what average and model students can achieve.

Having a low salary like this can definitely have its own effects. For one, it will be more difficult to pay for essentials such as food, shelter, and utilities. Credit card companies may only offer lower maximum credit allowance, and that’s assuming they’d be willing to approve a credit card application at all. These, in turn, could lead to their own effects.

Are There Exceptions to the Rule?

There are some bad students that will get to avoid the effects of their poor performance. Some of them have the financial means to get into better colleges. Some of them may have family businesses they can easily find good-paying employment. And then there are those who manage to completely change their attitude after school and make something out of themselves.

It may be difficult for to do a complete turnaround after leaving school. Which is why it’s always best to start early and improve yourself while you’re still in the classroom.

THE 10 HABITS OF BAD STUDENTS

I was once a student – I am still a student, and will ever be, because I learn always and from everything I see. In my opinion, everyone is a student because one way or the other, we all learn or are supposed to learn. Learning isn’t only confined to the classroom – life itself is a teacher – only babies don’t realise that, but unfortunately, some so called adults are actually babies. The way they make their decisions, and the way they take actions coupled with their reactions to stimuli is pathetically penultimate to jejune mentality. Without further ado, let me dive straight into what makes a bad student.

1. A bad student hates the teacher: you may not like the subject, but never hate the teacher even if there are multiple reasons to. I must be honest, some teachers don’t deserve being liked for so many different reasons, but the moment you hate them, your passion for the subject will take a deep. As a secondary school student, I hated my French teacher. God knows, it was my worst subject – I never passed it.

2. A bad student blames the teacher: sometimes, you may not hate the teacher but end up blaming him when you fail, which I consider irresponsible.

I remember when I started life as a professional person – I was a teacher, but the pay was abysmal, and because in my country then, the main industries that offered you good pay were the banks and oil companies, most people wanted to study accounting. Coming from a biochemistry background was very challenging, so most of us decided to reposition. To do so, I registered to start a foundation course in professional accounting, and take the exams. We had an economics lecturer who was very friendly but an incompetent teacher. He would come to class drunk, and he taught us what should be taught to first year secondary school students in economics. None of us complained. We were all adults. We were all professionals. We were all degree holders.

I later decided that becoming a qualified accountant wasn’t for me, so I dropped out. None of those who took the exams passed economics, and they all blamed the lecturer. We had the opportunity to correct the situation by making a complaint to the management of the institution, but we didn’t. If we didn’t, we had no moral right to blame the lecturer. Stop blaming the teacher – take responsibilities.

3. A bad student is defensive: I don’t mind a person getting it wrong – we all do sometimes. I don’t mind a person failing – somehow, sometime, we have all failed. What I dislike is being defensive for your misdemeanour. If you have failed, show some good attitude, accept the fact that you failed, take responsibilities, make corrections, and try again. When you defend failures, you will fail again – people who keep failing are excuse makers and defensive people. There’s always a reason or reasons for failing, but don’t give it a credit – don’t glorify failures.

4. Some bad students are lazy: heaven knows, some students are extraordinarily lazy – physical and mental laziness. To a lazy student, learning isn’t development – it is a stress. As a little child, going back to school after a holiday used to annoy me so much. In my little head, I would curse those who introduced schooling into the world – that’s exactly how some adults think. Rather than see the relevance of learning, they see the pains without ever considering its immense benefits.

5. Some bad students are inflexible: I learnt how to drive in my country before relocating to the UK, and in learning, I picked up some bad habits. When I registered to be instructed on driving in the UK, the bad habits were the first to show up. At first, I was so rigid on the negative stuffs I had picked up – it was tough learning the good stuffs. To learn, I had to unlearn my bad habits. Till date, I still struggle with just a little bit of it, but most times, my subconscious reminds me that it’s wrong. Being flexible is key to learning.

6. A bad student procrastinates: some students are not lazy, they don’t hate or blame the teacher, they make no excuses or aren’t defensive, but they don’t take actions on time, and because of that, their performances end up being mediocre in terms of the results. It hurts to see very bright people get average results because of delayed actions. Besides the conventional tests or exams, if you don’t wake up early to take care of your life, what you will get will be a mediocre life.

7. A bad student does not do research: good students don’t just rely on what was given in the class, they do their own researches to get more information. These days, there are so much information out there because of digital technology. There’s virtually no information you can’t find on YouTube. We have other learning platforms like Lynda, Udemy, Teachable, WizIQ, Ruzuku, Educadium, LearnWorlds, Thinkific, Academy of Mine, and the one my children make use of, Exemplar. You have no excuse relying on just one source of knowledge when there are multiples of them. Do your research – stop depending on a single channel.

8. Some bad students lack social skills: some students are timid, they are shy to ask questions – some are even too proud to ask what they don’t understand. Recently, my wife told me that one of her sister-in-laws has never been unemployed because of her good social skills, in spite of many of her mates that couldn’t find jobs when they left school. She knew and still knows how to ask questions on what she needs, and she does it in such a polite and friendly manner. To be a good student, you must step out of your shell – ask your teachers, mentors, mates, friends, what you don’t understand – you will get more information and become better if you do.

9. A bad student never pays attention to details: when some people are learning, or are supposed to be learning, their minds travel far away from the classroom or the environments they are. Some only hear the introduction – every other information is blank – they can’t pay attention to the details of the information. Same thing happens when some people are reading – when they get to the most important bits, that’s when they either sleep off or get distracted. To some, they come up with continual irrelevant questions when they should pay attention to details.

10. Some bad students are mad: I had a classmate in the university whose first name was Tony – he was the oldest person in the class – as at then, he was already a father when some of us were just 20, 21 years old.

Anyone who has taken a course in biochemistry or studied it knows that the discipline is full of what we call structures. Biochemical structures are molecular structures and dynamics of biological macromolecules such as proteins, carbohydrates, nucleic acid, and much more. And in answering most biochemistry questions, you must include the structures, otherwise, you’re merely writing history, and you will fail. Structures are terribly difficult to put into the head especially the cyclical and aromatic ones. Tony, the oldest man in the class, who should be more sensible, will write long baseless stories with no single structure in his answers. How can you answer questions on genetic engineering or fatty acid biosynthesis without drawing the structures? As a biochemist or to someone that’s a student of biochemistry, it’s madness. Every semester, he also kept getting mad results.

Any body of knowledge has its rules, and if you don’t follow it, you’re mad. We obviously have mad students!

What makes a bad student

What is the main characteristic of a good student? A good student must have a huge desire and passion to learn and explore something new. Everything would indeed seem very easy and enjoyable if we think of school as a place for discovering our self as person not as a frustrating place where we are always pressured by a tremendous amount of work. Furthermore, a good student must be punctual, organized, and know how to develop self-discipline. For instance, he or she must always come to class and the assignments and projects on time. Developing a good time-management and self-discipline is, in fact, a part of professional development for students and directly related to their success. In addition, a good student must be active and be polite. A good student would actively participate in the class discussions and would not hesitate to ask questions to his or her teachers. In addition, a good student would also always listen to the teachers and never interrupt when the teachers are talking or explaining something. Other aspects of a good student are honesty and consistency. A good student should be academically honest in all aspects of their schoolwork. For example, he or she would never cheat on tests or presents the work done by others as if it were his or her own (plagiarizes). Lastly, consistency is very critical in the process of learning since it helps students to achieve their academic goals.
In my opinion, I have been a good student so far. I have met most of the criteria of a good student described above. For instance, I have a good sense of responsibility and punctuality, always do my homework, participate in all scheduled classes, and hand in the assignments and projects on time. However, I realize that there are still many hindrances that might keep me from achieving my academic goals such as lack of optimism and confidence. I need to overcome these weaknesses in order to become a successful student. I believe that by always b.