College: How I Got the Most Out of My Parents' Investment

Still, it makes sense to get good grades, if only because graduate schools really do care about them. The easiest way to get good grades is to work harder and spend more time picking classes. In my experience, there was a lot of variability between professors in terms of how difficult they made getting good grades.

If you ask around, you can usually find out how difficult a class is, and adjust your course selection accordingly. That's the easiest, and thus the smartest, way to get good grades.

Here's some more advice for potential dean's-listers. You should learn how to write (something they don't really teach in most high schools), learn how to do research (something I didn't pick up until my junior year), and whatever else you do, don't plagiarize.

Forget the morality angle, it's just too easy for you to get caught. I knew a girl who plagiarized almost every paper she wrote for school, and she was caught only in the final semester of her senior year.

She failed the class that she plagiarized in, and then another professor went through her work, found another example of plagiarism, and failed her in his course, too. It was almost criminally stupid behavior on her part, and it cost her parents a bundle paying for an extra semester so that she could actually graduate.