10 Steps to Earning Awesome Grades (While Studying Less)

material that you should learn. These paragraphs should be read intently.
Enter Cal’s pseudo-skimming method; essentially, you’re going through your 
readings at a staggered pace. One moment you’ll be quickly scanning through 
paragraphs, the next you’ll notice an important paragraph and slow down to 
take it in fully.
Deliberately attempting to read using the pseudo-skimming method will prevent 
your brain from automatically giving equal preference to every paragraph in a 
reading (which, in my case, meant diligently reading each one for the first 10 
minutes while my willpower was high, then eventually scanning/skipping as I 
got further into the chapter and became bored).
Read the Chapter Backwards
Here’s the thing about textbook readings… they’re usually not suspenseful. They 
don’t have a narrative, and rarely will you spoil yourself by going to the end 
first.
You can take advantage of this by reading backwards. Before you dive into a 
chapter, flip to the back of it and see what’s there. Usually, you’ll see a list of 
key vocab terms, review questions, and other helpful stuff.
Use what you find here to prime your brain for the actual reading. Once you’ve 
loaded what you can from the review section into the front of your 
consciousness, you’ll be able to pick out those bits more easily when you read 
them in the actual text.
Create Questions While You Read
One of the concepts I’ll be diving deeper into later on in the book is Active 

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10 Steps to Earning Awesome Grades (While Studying Less)
24
Recall - the practice of forcing your brain to actually retrieve information instead 
of just passively exposing yourself to it. Doing this helps you learn much more 
efficiently.
An easy way to prep for Active Recall-based study sessions is to create 
questions while you do your reading assignments. You should definitely take 
notes when you read - either during or immediately afterward - and a great way 
to process these notes for easy studying is to pull details from them and rework 
them into questions you can quiz yourself on later.
In addition to the details from your notes, another great source of questions is 
the section headings of your actual readings. These generally pull out the main 
idea of a section, so using them as a basis for a question is a good way to jog 
your memory of that section’s most salient points.