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Guidelines to Good Study Practices
 A university education is different from other types of education you've received over your life. Courses on the university level teach you to be self sufficient in your learning, emphasizing the self-learning experience. The idea is to teach you to learn instead of enabling you to learn. This way, you can continue to grow personally and professionally throughout the course of your adult life and your professional career.
The self-learning technique isn't a system, per se, more than it's a flexible method that each student will use differently depending on their particular abilities. There are various pieces of literature out there to help a student grasp this technique:
R. Barrass, Study! A guide to effective study, revision and examination techniques
F. Casey, How to Study: a practical guide
R. Ellis, K. Hopkins, How to succeed in written work and study
Many tutors also specialize in the self-learning techniques that help millions of students earn their degree every year.
Time Management as a Key Factor
If you were to draw up any plan to help you become better at something, be it studying, working or a number of other aspects, time management would always be a key factor in helping you achieve a goal.
If you're a full-time undergraduate student, you will be studying around 120 credits for 10 hours each - 1,200 hours over an academic year. The teaching time here is concentrated into 24 weeks and, including exams, allows students a 30-week window to learn the material. Needless to say, proper time management is essential.
How you choose to manage your time is very critical to your passing or failing in class. For all intents and purposes, most students will be "working" a full 40 hours in class every week, not to mention the time it takes studying at home.
To manage your time, you need to develop a system that allows you to properly study without interference and without becoming drained in the process. This will require that you sacrifice some weekend time, spend some vacation time studying, and also cut back on your extracurricular activities.
Classroom Schedules
Missing classes happens all the time at both on-location universities and virtual classrooms. It's never a good idea to fall behind in the work or miss a lecture, so what do you do if you miss a class?
The first step here is to speak to someone, a tutor if you have one. If not, speak to the professor or another administrator and work toward making up the class in some form or fashion. At the very least, you'll show your commitment to learning. You'll be able to receive and complete your makeup work and easily step back into the fold. But you must inform someone.
Missing a lecture can also leave you playing catch up. Sometimes you'll be able to find a repeat of the lecture, but realistically you'll have to pursue other means. You could start by asking students who attended the lecture to share their notes. Or you could, of course, speak to the lecturer yourself about possibly picking up the talking points and other keynote points of the lecture.
You will certainly not always find sympathy for missing classes and/or lectures. The responsibility is on you as a student to attend. You won't be reprimanded for your absence in most cases, but you will fall behind quickly. Always work to make up your time as quickly as possible.
The same holds true with any assignments you have – tests, homework, projects and other work. If you don't turn them in on time, you will not receive a grade. Always make sure you turn your work in.
How to Monitor Your Progress
No one knows you better than you know yourself. To this end, you're the only person that can correctly judge your progress to date. This could be tricky, of course, as we all have biases. But it's important that you judge your performance.
When it comes to actual class performance, you can always ask how you're doing, not to mention that you'll be receiving progress reports. So monitoring your progress in this context is about finding out how you’re doing on your private study time and overall effort.
Just because this isn't graded doesn't mean it's not equally important. To find your progress here, you’re going to need to compare how you're doing in school to how you're feeling as a student.
Are you adjusting well to the course? Is the work too hard for you to keep up with? If you need to make any adjustments in your time management, now is the time. You should always be able to deal with the work day to day. If not, you'll need to revise your methods somehow, maybe by employing the help of a tutor.
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