It’s the holiday season! All you want to do is kick back, relax, and enjoy the holidays. Just a week of school before Christmas break. However, this is probably the most critical time of the year when you can’t afford to stop trying; here’s how to finish off strong.

1. Strive for the better grade

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You have heard this a million times from every person older than you, get the good grade. Well here is how I look at it: give yourself some breathing room during this time. The grade you are aiming for should be a mid-ranged to high grade; this will make the final less of a stress in that class. For instance, if I am aiming for a B in Calculus, I would want to be in the range of an 84%-89% before going into the final. That means that if you get a bad grade on the final, it won’t hurt your grade too much. Along with this, get as many missing assignments in as possible, those are worth more points than you think and trust me, a 50% is better than a zero.

2. Find your Priorities

Alright, you already know that when the two options, friends or homework, come up, you would obviously choose friends. Well, sorry to say, it’s finals week, your friends have finals they have to study for too. So try to combine the two, have study sessions, do homework together, or take a quick break and go look at some Christmas lights.

Second, figure out which classes are your hardest or need the most work in. For instance, rate your classes from 1-8 (or however many classes you have finals in) on a scale of how important the final is or how hard it will be. For instance, you have an 88% in chemistry and an 81% in Algebra. The Algebra test might be more important if you want to keep a B in the class. Or in another instance, the chemistry test might be much harder and require more studying time.

3. Acceptance

Finally, you are through finals week and the grades slowly start to trickle in and finalize. Well, I’m sure we have all had it where we were close to getting the grade we wanted, but not quite there. You were aiming for an A in AP European History, yet your final grade was an 89.35%, .15% off from that A-. Well here are your two options, accept the grade you got, or email your teacher if they will bump your grade up in the class. Most of the time if the teacher saw you working hard that semester, they may raise you. However, if they saw you slacking in class and turning in assignments late, they have every reason not to help you out.

4. Just Don’t Care

Overall a grade is a grade. If you have a B on your transcript it’s not the end of the world, you still can get into plenty of good colleges. Colleges tend to look more upon you as an individual than what grade you got in FST, so make yourself known for leadership, service, and try to make your standardized test scores as good as you can. Besides, it’s Christmas break, who cares about school when you can hang with your friends, bake gingerbread houses, and look at Christmas lights. The holiday season shouldn’t be ruined by one stupid grade, enjoy yourself and let off steam over these next two weeks of break.

Now is the most important time for your grades in school; my question to you is, how hard are you willing to work to keep them?