The College Success Rulebook: Practical Advice for College and Beyond
Practical Advice for College and Beyond
By Nathan Nobis
Freely available in Google Docs and PDF; also available in Kindle and Audible (although currently with a small error that's being corrected); other freely available formats are forthcoming!
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College gives students a remarkable amount of freedom—but succeeding in college requires knowing what to do with it.
The College Success Rulebook offers straightforward, practical advice for becoming a more successful and independent college student. It explains many of the habits and expectations that professors often assume students already understand, even though students may never have been explicitly taught them.
How should you prepare for class? What should you do when you don’t understand something? How can you use office hours effectively? What does it mean to study well rather than simply study longer? How should you use AI without allowing it to do the learning for you? And what habits will help you not only earn better grades, but become someone others can depend on?
Drawing on years of experience working with college students, Nathan Nobis offers concise guidance on attending and preparing for class, reading and writing, studying, managing time, communicating with professors, using technology and AI wisely, seeking help, responding to feedback, and developing your own ideas.
The larger goal is not simply to follow a collection of rules. It is to develop habits of excellence: habits that can help you learn difficult things, think independently, do good work, and prepare for life beyond college.
The College Success Rulebook offers straightforward, practical advice for becoming a more successful and independent college student. It explains many of the habits and expectations that professors often assume students already understand, even though students may never have been explicitly taught them.
How should you prepare for class? What should you do when you don’t understand something? How can you use office hours effectively? What does it mean to study well rather than simply study longer? How should you use AI without allowing it to do the learning for you? And what habits will help you not only earn better grades, but become someone others can depend on?
Drawing on years of experience working with college students, Nathan Nobis offers concise guidance on attending and preparing for class, reading and writing, studying, managing time, communicating with professors, using technology and AI wisely, seeking help, responding to feedback, and developing your own ideas.
The larger goal is not simply to follow a collection of rules. It is to develop habits of excellence: habits that can help you learn difficult things, think independently, do good work, and prepare for life beyond college.
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© 2026 Nathan Nobis. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0). You may share and adapt this work for any purpose, including commercially, provided appropriate credit is given. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
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An earlier attempt at similar content!
A Rulebook for Students
Success in College
& Beyond
&
This is a work in progress, combining independently developed student-success guidance materials by Nathan Nobis and Trevor Hedberg. Check back for updates! The source of these materials is this poster:
8/13/18:
The current "working" version of this book-in-progress is now available as a Google document. It includes material by John J. Burns (Morehouse College) and is set up in a manner to allow comments and suggestions from readers:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ZcSff0NjsVN6Br3oKlpoVwfWDs88g3WNgKTNeM1Z_8o/edit?usp=sharing
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
ISBN: XXX
ISBN-13: XXX
A RULEBOOK FOR STUDENTS
Some rules are meant to be broken and there are exceptions to many rules. For college students, though, there are rules they can follow that will contribute to success in their classes: they will learn more, have more enjoyable and rewarding class experiences, impress their professors with their involvement and quality work and, perhaps most importantly, get better grades.
College is an opportunity that can open the door to greater opportunities, and the more you make of your opportunities in college, the greater your chances for success beyond college, in many ways. Following these rules below will increase your likelihood of success, in many ways.
Below is first a list of rules, and below that list is a discussion of each rule. When any rule seems obvious, consider it a good reminder of what you should do. If any rule is new to you, think about how you can integrate into your practices as a student. And since a basic rule of college is to think critically, if you think some rule is a bad one, let us know why: you may be right!
With this all in mind, let us turn to the rules and the discussion of them.
Nathan Nobis, Ph.D.
Philosophy, Morehouse College, Atlanta, Georgia, USA
20 TIPS FOR BECOMING A
BETTER UNDERGRADUATE STUDENT
Many undergraduate students perform below their potential in college courses, and even those who perform well often do so in very inefficient ways, usually by studying excessively and limiting their engagement in other activities. While some students simply lack the discipline to do what conventional wisdom suggests they ought to do (e.g., attending class frequently, avoiding allnighters), some so-called conventional wisdom is actually misguided, and students’ adherence to it actually hinders their ability to develop optimal study habits.
This list is my attempt, based on my experiences as an undergraduate student and as a teacher of undergraduate students, to help current undergrads develop better study habits, achieve higher grades in their courses, and have a more fulfilling educational experience in the process. A few tips are reiterations of messages that students have probably heard before, but many are not as widely known. And some of them even oppose traditional study norms. Tips 1-10 represent the advice that largely aligns with common sense, and most of this advice will be familiar to most readers (although some of these tips are rarely followed). Tips 11-20, in contrast, tend to either conflict with common sense, or – despite their intuitive plausibility – to be rather unknown to most students. I follow each tip with an explanation of how students (generally) will benefit from following it.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Nathan Nobis, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Morehouse College, Atlanta, GA. He has taught courses, given lectures and published articles and chapters on a wide variety of topics concerning ethics and philosophy. His web page is at NathanNobis.com
Trevor Hedberg, Ph.D., is a postdoctoral researcher in philosophy at the University of South Florida. His primary research interests include applied ethics, normative ethics, and epistemology. A primary area of interest is the ethics of procreation in light of the environmental impacts of overpopulation. His web page is at http://www.trevorhedberg.com/
See also!
Online Course Communication Tips: How to Writing better discussion posts in online classes
You can make your experience in online courses (and all courses) better by thinking about how your work and participation affects other students. For online classes, a lot of that has to do with creating discussion posts that are easy to read and engage with. So here we give some guidance on how your discussion posts can contribute to a better experience for other students, and you yourself too!
