As a student going into their freshman year of college, I have had my fair share of tough teachers.

This strictness comes with heavy loads of homework, pop quizzes, and continuous efforts to make you fight for your grade. While their intention is simply to make you a stronger student, sometimes it causes an overwhelming amount of stress for students. This, in combination with the ever changing schedule of sports and extracurriculars, can make it impossible to balance your life. I can't speak on everyone's behalf but when you throw in AP classes and boosters to your college resume, it gets even harder.

Stress is something that is good in small amounts.

A little bit of it is motivating and can help you to meet deadlines. Too much of it will prevent you from being able to succeed because you weight yourself down. There is a golden spot in the middle where you should stay to balance your personal life with academics. There's a lot of pressure on tests and exams that "test" your knowledge and are used as a measure of placement for students. There is an increasing amount of students today that don't perform well on test style assignments. I am one of those students.

If I'm asked to create a presentation on anything that I have been taught, I will put my heart and soul into it. Now let's say I'm given a multiple choice test on the exact same material. There's a high chance I'm not going to do well on that test. It doesn't have anything to do with me not knowing the material or not studying. It's just the difference in how I process information.

This is the case for many students. Anyone can take colorful notes or record what a teacher says and play it back later. Different things work for different people. Another example is the SAT. The SAT supposedly measures your comprehension in the areas of math, English, and grammar. Colleges use these scores to determine how ready for college you are when sometimes, it's not a good portrayal of a student's academic capability.

People say to study smarter, not harder.

If you're falling asleep at midnight while staring at textbook pages then that's probably not your learning style. Flashcards and memorization might be how you learn or simply recreating what you learned in your own way. Whatever it is, discovering what kind of learner you are now is critical to your college career as well as your future career to enable your ability to comprehend what you're taught and to be learning less stressful.