had been teaching here for 15 years,” says Arizona State University Prof. Claude Olney, ”so you can imagine my how I felt when my own son tested so low that he couldn`t get in. Well, we managed to get him in on probation, but then the problem was to keep him in. He got nine A`s his first year.”
That was in 1981, and the secret of Olney`s son`s success was that his father took up the study of ways to make A`s out of B`s and C`s. He passed them on to his son and parlayed his method into a copyrighted 3 1/2-hour seminar and audio cassettes. He gets $500 for a seminar; $29.95 for the cassettes (Box 686, Scottsdale, Ariz. 85252). He has a raft of testimonials to show they work.
What Olney`s advice boils down to is that studying hard is not so important as studying smart, and his 20-step method is mostly common sense:
Choose subjects that interest you; sit in on prospective classes; learn memory tricks, and this:
”A professor at Northwestern asked his wife, who had beautiful penmanship, to copy some messy exam papers word-for-word,” says Olney. ”He mixed those exams in with the others and passed them all out to his teaching assistants to grade. On the average, the rewritten papers got A`s and the sloppy ones with identical content got C`s. So neatness does count, and for that reason I recommend writing exams with erasable ink.”
As for hard work, ”students deceive themselves by thinking that if they sit in the library for two hours, they will get a high grade because they deserve it,” says Olney. ”There is no grade for hard work, only for correct answers. In fact, 10 hours of study in 20-minute spurts is worth 15 hours of study in exhausting two-hour periods.”
Olney`s advise on checking out prospective teachers verges on the idiotically obvious. ”Students spend at least three minutes checking out a blind date they`ll spend three hours with,” says Olney, ”and they spend no minutes checking out a professor they`ll spend three months with.
”None of this is magic,” he says, ”but it`s like magic in that once a trick is explained, everyone says he could have done it himself.”
