Making the Grade: A Guide to Study and Success

by Iain Hay, Dianne Bochner, Nellie Perret

A core text for first-year university students enrolled in a student success course or workshop; this text is also a useful reference guide for undergraduates across faculties and disciplines.

Filled with practical techniques for today's student, Making the Grade: A Guide to Study and Success is an insightful, easy-to-use guide that will help students develop the skills they need to excel at the university level. With an emphasis on skill-building in core areas such as time management, reading strategically, and effective note-taking, this text provides an introduction to university life, along with strategies for effective note-taking, active listening, productive group work, and much more. Authored by an international team whose members have been working in the field since 1993, Making the Grade: A Guide to Study and Success has been classroom-tested in Australia, where it has remained the top-selling text of its kind since 1997. Now thoroughly updated for the Canadian market, this excellent skills-oriented text includes exercises that allow students to practise newly acquired strategies such as back-planning, chunking, and the Cornell note-taking system. Designed for today's student, Making the Grade reflects the changing reality of Canadian classrooms with sixteen chapters that incorporate coverage of new technology such as course blogs, podcasts, and online class discussion boards, as well as specific advice for students with disabilities and students for whom English is an additional language.

331 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1997

Reviews

[gemsbooknook Geramie Kate Barker · Rating 5 out of 5]

‘This book is a practical guide for students, full of the essential communication and study skills that will help them ‘make the grade’. Covering all the skills that will be used across a degree, the book begins with listening skills, efficient time management and working effectively with a team and takes students right through their course to the best tips for taking exams.
In between, it investigates and explains all formats in which lecturers usually ask students to convey their ideas, including essays, reports, annotated bibliographies, reviews, oral presentations, posters, and figures and tables. It also offers assistance revision, referencing and using the library effectively.
Students can read the book from front to back, look up particular topics as they need to, or use just one section they find useful. Each chapter is self-contained and deals with a different aspect of the skills necessary for both successful university learning and communication, assisting students to navigate the culture, language and conventions of successful study at university.’
This book is awesome.
I had to read this book as part of my required reading at University, and I am very glad that I did. I found it really useful and actually quite interesting.
This book covers so many different facets of university work while giving you tips and ways in which you can better understand and manage your time at university.
I really like the way each section in broken down and that there are diagrams explaining or and showing the reader how things are suppose to be done at university.
One of the best aspects in my opinion is all of the timetables and marking criteria sheets. Not only have I now started using some of the timetables in my own study, but seeing the marking criteria laid out helped me see what was expected of me, in both my course work and assessments, in a clear and concise way.
Making The Grade by Iain Hay is a must have for all university students or soon to be university students.

Geramie Kate Barker
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