He should step down . <| sep |> Depending on the class and workload I ' d do something like thisRead the section ahead of class , take notes of the definitions and work through proofs , try to understand the as much as I can , make a pass over all the problems , do as many as I can . Then in class I already know what is hardinteresting to me , I know where to ask an interesting question . Pro tip when you are asking questions in class that show you read the material and you ' re intersted in a fine detail of what the professor is talking about your grade may magically land on the high side of any borderline . Then , if anything in the text isn ' t crystal clear attend office hours . Do all the problems you can , turn in the assigned problems typed up yes , even computational ones . It helped I was also friends with the genius in the program . I got good evaluations but my friend was the guy who TA ' d Spivak while taking the class his first year while breezing through Dummit and Foote at the same time . Being able to walk into his room at random times to discuss shit helped a lot . That said , if you do things in that order the homework gets a lot easier because you have a better handle on the material . Here ' s the key , you get ahead on day minus 7 and stay there , once you get behind it ' s hard to catch up with this , but , if you get ahead before the semester it ' s not too bad . I could get syllabi early if the prof didn ' t have the last time they taught the class online somewhere . I could count on using breaks for catch up , those were take home midterm time . If I had it to do over again the one thing I would change is trying to memorize things better . I have a crap memory and I didn ' t realize it until after I graduated . My genius buddy could read a chapter and know every definition by heart , I never could , I had to reason what the definitions were from the concepts which I can remember . If I study something now I use one of the flash card programs with LaTeX support and work on memorizing definitions and the hypothesisconclusions of theorems and sometimes even proofs where the technique of the proof is interesting to me . I still believe the concepts amdnbeing able tonreason with them are the important thing but working through a proof it ' s much easier when the precise definitions are at recall rather than turning through the book .