Well if you work hard at anything you'll get good at it
Anyways working your ass off is one thing
Its working your ass of consistenly for 4-6 years is what gets you really good grades
And alot of people study hard but don't understand wtf they are studying, so the can study for months on end and still get successive F's
If your studying and you find something hard (eg. a question or theorm in maths) circle it and give it to your teacher the next maths class and say 'I ain't fu**ing leaving till i understand wtf all the bulls**t means' (ok mabye not that)
Cause studying is really pointless unless you understand what your doing
Its like you have a bad technique of kicking, but you don't know that, so you keep practicing and eventually your kicking is really bad almost instinctivly bad, and then you have to go through the process of un-learn that and re-learning the correct technique
btw when you said a sh*t load of work to get to thier level can you name specific things i would need to do
-Understand what your teacher is explaining everyday
-Your one day gonna dose off and lose focus in class, but if you do make sure you ask the teacher to go over everything they just explained in the class (tell her you didn't understand)
-Take summary notes on each subject after doing homework stating all the main points you should remember from that day and keep these in a big ass 'revision' notebook
-Study them mainly, use your workbooks or homework to help explain the theories in them
-Ask your teacher about exam technique (I dunno if you have this in america)
-Pick your 3 best subjects and your 2 worst ones and focus mainly on these, but don't neglect the 'inbetweeners' its important to bring all your subjects up grades in succession, so first you get at least one A subject and bring your weakest ones up to about C standard
Thats alot and that plan should be initiated over the course of years, but the educational system is different in Ireland compared to America, so you should get an Americans advice/opinion