Getting Over Bad Exam Results
Or how to accept a disappointing outcome when you are not used to it.
This is a more personal essay, which stems from recent reflections on a confusing period of my life. I will not follow a writing plan or bullet points, as I usually do, because I want to write it while I am untidily reflecting on it. I will just leave everything here. Hopefully, you or someone else will take something from it, which will help them do some considerations or perhaps pat themselves on the back.
In the UK and in many other countries, this is the time of the year in which most universities either are running exams or are already releasing exam results. These, at least in the UK, carry a significant weight over the final grades of the year; therefore, they can either shift your grade for good or for worse. Whether this is the right way to examine knowledge or there are alternative and better methods is not the concern of this article. However, it can be discussed in the future.
Here, I will go through my reactions and thoughts to my second year’s exam results, and hopefully, some of my thoughts can be of good use for you or someone you know. As you could probably deduce, I was not satisfied with my exam results. I did not get “bad” grades, but as I will go through later, I believe that is not what makes a result disappointing.
What Determines a Bad Result?
People talk about not doing well when they are not satisfied with an exam, being below average, or some keep saying they “failed”. However, the definition of a “bad” result is not always obvious. Empirically, I guess a “bad” result is anything below the average of the class that you find yourself in, which should be a group of people academically somewhat similar to you. Another definition of bad is a result below a specific grade associated with employability, or what is considered good in the university; in this case, it would be a 2:1, which for the US readers roughly translates to a 3.5 GPA.
On the other hand, I think that the previously explained definitions of a “bad result” completely lose their meaning regarding the importance assigned to a result. When we say “good” or “bad” while facing a new result, we actually mean “satisfied” and “unsatisfied”.
What is Satisfaction: General Reasons
Satisfaction is a big mix of different factors, general ones, applicable to the majority, and personal. A general factor can be external pressure, which is how the result is translated into employability and social acceptancy. More general factors can be the pressure put on you by your professors, if they follow you closely, or tutors. Stepping into more personal ones, we find parent’s pressure, which is general as everyone feels some sort of slight pressure from their parents either because they look up to them or because they are very focused on their son/daughter’s education. However, it is personal as it entirely depends on your situation. I have never felt particular pressure from my parents except for a basal level born out of respect and admiration.
What is Satisfaction: Personal Reasons
Personal reasons can be infinite as they are specific to each of us. A common one, especially among keen students, is the comparison with previous results, which is like looking at a chart tracking performance. A bad result is a downward peak in this chart. Even if the result itself is above a horizontal line, which represents the general definition of a “good” result, this type of student will still be disappointed and not satisfied. In my second year, this was my case as I did not get bad results, but I severely underperformed.
Another valuable personal reason is the internal feel of having failed to abide by your academic duties during the year. Again, in this case, the result does not necessarily have to be “bad” in absolute measures. Still, the feeling that you left things behind during the year plants a little voice in your ear whispering: “if you didn’t, you would have done better”. These people do not see the performance tracking chart mentioned earlier, but what is most important to them is feeling that they gave everything they could. If they feel like they didn’t, they will never be satisfied.
Lastly, some people could never be satisfied with their results, and these, even though they usually thrive, might never be completely happy in the end.
The First Reaction
The first reaction to a bad result might be bewilderment, followed quite closely by either anger or profound sadness. I tend to be at the intersection of confusion and anger as I do not give enough importance to grades to become sad. Still, I get angry at myself for not having performed at the height of my expectations because it means that something in my method is flawed. Additionally, I believe that sadness is a road that does not lead anywhere, whilst anger can spark creativity, but more generally, a reaction.
If the evaluation was carried out correctly, then the bewilderment is not really justified by anything except for unpreparedness. What is left is anger or sadness.
Excuses Blame and Wrongs Ways to Get Out
Most times, when you hear someone speaking about a bad result, everyone around them tends to be very comforting. Still, I think it is a bit trivial and maybe thoughtless to just give yourself a pat on the back and get over it. Everyone knows that feeling, and hearing “it’s ok you’ll do better next time” is like hearing “calm down, everything is ok” when you are enraged.
To surpass the first reaction, that spur of anger or that deep dark hole of sadness, there are easier ways than others. Excuses tend to be the first resort. “After all, I was not feeling great during that exam”, “I was too busy with the rugby team this year”. “The two topics that came up were just the ones that I had omitted when preparing for the exam”. I used to fall into excuses that are only a trap, moving sand. You get stuck until you understand that persisting in it will only bring you further down.
Blames such as “The professor who marked does not like me”, “It must have been my handwriting which is hard to understand, they definitely marked down my exam because of that”, “They must have made some mistake in the marking of the paper” are another common easy way out. In the end, blames are just another form of excuses, although they are worse as they tend to assign the fault to someone else. The last easy way out is to ignore the bad result, consider it as a misstep, a one time mistake, an outlier in a graph, when it would be a lot better to work through it.
Conclusion
You might have asked yourself, why did I not write about how to go past the first reaction in a good way and how to learn from a failure, and that is because I believe all I could have said, and pretty much anyone can say, is trivial and heard before. The way we work through these things is personal, and I’d instead look at how we get there and the wrong ways out, then trying to find a magical keystone to the problem.
Ultimately, this was just me working through an unimpressive university performance. It was not an essay with a precise topic and conclusion. When writing, I prefer a planned essay to a free flow of thoughts. Still, this time, I felt like someone might relate and maybe find something that they could use themselves to rationalise exam results:
So much time and effort condensed into a number, a class or a letter.
