“It seems like I have lost all motivation for this semester. Since it’s so close to finals, this is the time that I should really be pulling myself together and making good grades to make sure the year ends on a good note. Unfortunately, I haven’t been successful in this and last week I made a horrible grade on a very important test. It didn’t completely sink my class grade, but I’m having trouble letting go of the fact I did so poorly. Do you have any advice on how to get over a bad grade?”
With only a few weeks of school left, it’s hard for anyone to find the motivation to keep doing school work. Summer is so close, but seems so far away due to all of the tests, presentations and projects coming up.
The first thing to remember is that you are not the first, and certainly not the last, person to get a bad grade in college. It happens every day. Although the semester is ending, there is still plenty of time to bounce back from a bad grade. You can’t let one bad grade ruin all of your hard work; you’ve come too far.
One piece of advice I can give you is to figure out why you got the grade that you did. That way, you can try to improve the next time around. This might entail talking to the professor, or realizing it was just a bad test. Once you figure out what went wrong, the best thing to do is just let go of the bad grade. Realize that it probably won’t be the only time you do poorly on an assignment, but also realize that a grade is just a number and that it doesn’t define anything about you. You have to move on from this bad grade and see that there are still many assignments left, and plenty of good grades left to get.
I hope this semester ends on the positive note that you want, and that you can learn to let go of this one grade.
– RLCG Marissa