Now that midterm grades are posted and our anxiety has (somewhat) lessened, it’s important to bring up a point that has my brain boiling – TESTS ARE NOT A FAIR WAY OF EVALUATING OUR INTELLIGENCE!
I know that this is completely my own opinion, but it’s so frustrating. This semester, I’m taking the dreaded St. Bonaventure class, Inquiry in the Natural World. After failing the first test, my midterm grade was a D. It’s a physics and chemistry class that has nothing to do with my major, so why is it causing me and many others so much stress? I had good grades in every class except for that one, which shows firsthand how students can excel at some things more than others.
As a journalism major, I can easily write 1,000 words in 30 minutes. When it comes to tests, I can barely get through them without studying for at least a full week ahead of time and breaking a sweat during the exam. When you’re interested and care about what you’re learning, you’re likely to do better in the class. Sorry Copernicus and Plato, but I’m just not that into you.
For a lot of students, the stress and anxiety that their classes and workloads bring can be backbreaking. Some of us take it more seriously than others. You see the people who can brush it off and laugh off the bad grades. On the other hand, there are the students who continuously worry about grades, even when there’s nothing they can really do to change them. They’ll study for hours on end in the library, frantically email their professors and spend their lives in office hours. These are the people who will do whatever it takes to get that GPA up.
When you think about it, it’s not fair to try so hard and spend tedious amounts of time and effort working towards something that doesn’t come naturally to you. What about the other talents that we have? Are our grades really everything? Our personalities and unique attributes are things that can’t be put down on paper.
Conquering midterms feels like a great feat now, but we can’t forget that finals are going to be coming up sooner than we expect. We need to try our hardest, but at the end of the day, we also need to remember what we came to school for. Don’t let hard classes and bad grades get you down when you have talents that reach far beyond the letter on a piece of paper.
The best piece of advice I can give comes from the all-knowing God herself, Carrie Bradshaw, when she says, “the best we can do is breathe and reboot.”