titles next to it on the shelf, none of the advice presented here was devised by professors or self-proclaimed academic skills experts. I promise that you won't find any mention of the Cornell note-taking method, mental map diagrams, or any other "optimal learning technique" crafted in an office or laboratory—environments far removed from the realities of typical college life.
Instead, this book reveals—for the first time—the study habits used by real straight-A college students. All of the advice that follows was distilled from a series of interviews I conducted with a large group of top-scoring undergraduates. These participants were drawn predominantly from the Phi Beta Kappa rolls of some of the country's most rigorous colleges and universities—including Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Dartmouth, Brown, Columbia, Duke, Amherst, and Skidmore—and they were carefully chosen to represent a wide variety of academic concentrations. In each interview, I asked the student to detail his or her study habits. The questions ranged from the general ("How do you defeat the urge to procrastinate?") to the specific ("What techniques or systems do you use to locate and organize sources for a research paper?"). If the questionnaire revealed the student to be a grind— someone who earns high grades simply by studying an excessive amount—I discarded the responses. I was interested only in students who improved their grades
through smarter, more efficient study skills—not through
