Some good advice

Mental Multivitamin has a wrap-up of her (previously homeschooled) daughters' first year at college, along with general "good advice" for the college bound: Sit in the Front Row.

Oh, yes, so much to all of that. (And I say this as someone "on the other side of the desk").

Of course, it's a chicken-and-egg question: do people do those behaviors because they're inherently motivated and good students, or does doing those behaviors encourage one to do well? I can say about where you sit in a classroom mattering: my habit, in general, was to sit in the front row (or the second row; there were a few classes where you didn't want to be in the very front). A couple times in grad school when I was more or less "auditing" a class and so chose to sit in the back (to allow the enrolled students a shot at the front row) I found that my attention to the prof was not so good, and also, there was much more temptation to talk to my friend sitting next to me. (In fact, I remember a prof making a joke about "the disruptive people in the back" when a few of the fellow profs showed up to his class - because they wanted to learn the stats technique he was going to demonstrate - and they sat in the back. And yes, they did talk.)

A couple other comments:

the "backpack inventory." I've said before I was mildly compulsive as a student (still am) about making sure I had pencils, paper, that my calculator was working, etc. I've had students walk in to an exam empty-handed and ask me to borrow a pen or pencil. Well, for one thing, I don't generally carry pens or pencils to exams (I'm carrying other stuff, and I find loaning pens is a good way to lose them) and I'm also just....flabbergasted. Yes, I suppose it's possible to have a pen in your pocket and have it fall out, but I don't that happens enough to explain the 2-3 students I get per exam that don't have a pen or pencil.

To me, it suggests the person is unprepared for the exam if they show up without something to write with. (These also tend to be students who do not take notes, so they usually don't have a pen or pencil)

Also, the "do not talk during class, do not text, do not nap." That one always gets to me and I am sure I take it far more personally than I should, but I grew up being taught "attention is a form of respect" and when I see someone texting in class, it says to me, "I do not want to be here, I do not care about what is going on in class." Talking in class is almost worse because it disrupts other people around the talker who might be trying to learn. (I tend to call out talkers more often than I do texters. Because I've had a few texters who, if I didn't let them text, WOULD talk - in one case a constant, sotto voce stream of snarky comments. Yes, I would be within my rights to throw that person out, but sometimes that kind of thing just causes more problems and more ripples - if they go to my chair, if they go to the dean, if their parents hear one side of the story and get upset....)

The whole deadline thing, too. I've said before that when I was assigned a paper, I would go home THAT DAY and make a timeline of intermediate due dates, for example, I need to have the background research done by such-and-such a day, and an outline by such-and-such a day, and I always tried my best to have a good draft a minimum of a week before the due date so I could let it sit for a day and then revise it. Even in cases where the only official due date was the big one at the end. (Perhaps in my class-with-the-big-paper, I need to set more intermediate due dates. I know the prepared students would find it patronizing but I get enough students who panicflail a couple days before the paper is due and come in and say they can't find background research, or they don't know how to interpret their results, or they don't know how to structure the paper....)

The truth is, none of the advice in there is so very mystical. A lot of it is just plain old common sense and time management, with perhaps a tiny dose of "treat others with the respect with which you would expect to be treated" thrown in. And yeah, some of it does require being a bit proactive and being able to go in and talk to people, which I know some students have trouble with (and frankly, I have trouble with cold-calling someone, or walking into an office to ask someone for something - but I do it, because I have to). But a lot of people don't learn that stuff until later on in life, and that's unfortunate. (And some never learn it, which is really unfortunate.)