30 Part I The Transition to College Copyright Goodheart-Willcox Co., Inc. “It’s never too late to change your experience.” This simple sentence is the best advice. It might not seem particularly life-changing, but when you start to con- vert this into action, it is. To elaborate, this refers to the feeling that many of us experience when there is a gap between the way we are experiencing something and the way we want it to be. Perhaps it is in a class, or on a team, or in a rela- tionship, where you’re dissatisfied with the results or quality of your experience and you know you could invest differently and change the outcome, but you just don’t. Maybe you figure that it’s not worth it to change. This comes from general laziness, which we all experience, where we think “It’s not worth the effort to take steps to fix this.” You’ll only be in college for a certain amount of years. It could be three, four, five, or more, but it will certainly not be forever. With experiences that have time limits, it’s easy to fall into this mindset because of the knowledge of a set end. CRITICAL MOMENT Instructor When students score less than 60% on the multiple-choice exams I give in class, I ask the students to meet with me individually so we can assess “what happened” and what is in their control to do differently. Often, when students first sit down with me, they will say, “I’m just really bad at taking tests.” While I believe that we do have different abilities at some level for taking tests AND that some tests are not really testing what has been learned in class (they’re actually testing the student’s ability to guess what the person writing the test was thinking at the moment they wrote it) AND that some tests are written in ways that give advantages to some students over others, I also believe that many students are stuck in a fixed mindset related to test taking. Because they believe they can’t improve, they don’t put in the effort. When they do poorly on an exam, they don’t blame it on lack of effort or misplaced effort, they simply think they’re not good at test taking. When I work with these students one-on-one, we’ll look for the easy fixes of how to get better on the tests. Do they understand the core theoretical framework we use in the class (and that appears in about 20% of the exam questions)? If they don’t, we talk about it until they understand it and then we look at the questions that ask them to apply the framework. Next, have they done all of the reading for the class? What is their approach to reading? Do they annotate the text or take notes on it in some other way? Do they take notes during class? How did they prepare for the exam? Once we’ve talked through these things, then we go through the exam, question by question and they do a “talk-aloud” about why they chose what they chose. Almost always, once we’ve met and gone through this one time, their results on the next exam improve. And many will tell me, “I guess I’m getting better at taking tests.”