So pretty much how my day was so far:
Well I messed up big time and didn’t do so well on my midterm. I know, go to the professor and find out what I got wrong, don’t make the same mistakes and try harder for the next midterm and final. Well, I still broke down anyways when I got my score through the website.
A couple hours later I emailed the professor if there were any worksheets or websites that had practice drills so I could get faster on the problems because time was a pretty big issue. He may have misinterpreted my message and told me to stop looking for magical ways to do a problem and that most people can do this quiz in the amount of time given which sort of upset me and I ended up sobbing again.
Then I decided that I should eat something so I went to a cafe when I overheard someone say “yum” as “yam” which made me cry again because it reminded me of how my parents say the word (kinda weirdly) and I felt overwhelmed with guilt because they’re paying for my education.
I headed over at the box in a building (it literally is a box on the ground with bunch of papers) with my quiz for a different class which didn’t matter as much but I ended up not doing too well for this either (bc I had blindly studied for that midterm). For some reason mine was at the very top of the box so every passing person could see I failed my quiz. So of course, I started crying then too.
I swear I don’t cry easily (at least not like this) and I’m so pissed at myself at this point. I want to improve but I’m exhausted and I hardly have energy to walk to my next class. It also doesn’t help that I wouldn’t really be thinking about my awful midterm and then I suddenly feel my nose running and tears blurring my vision and feel like a total piece of crap.
Has anyone else dealt with this? Can anyone give me something to work here? I tried imagining what my parents would tell me but I’m pretty sure they’d just tell me I just can’t and that my future is bleak. Or they give me false encouragement and I see disappointment in their eyes.
It’s just not helping and I’m driving myself insane.
Thanks,
Bad scores are going to happen no matter what you do. They are just a part of life. It seems that you are being too hard on yourself. You need to take a breather and examine the bigger picture. There will be other exams and quizzes. Try to start a study group with classmates and see how that goes. You say that timing is an issue when taking tests; try and practice problems from the textbook to improve your time. Just don’t be too hard on yourself over a few poor scores.
Almost everyone I know has failed an exam at one point or another. I just recently graduated with a BS in mathematics. Math was my best subject by far. But I still failed probably around 7 or 8 math exams throughout my undergraduate career, the lowest of which was a 22 (40 points below the class average).
What subject is this class on if you don’t mind me asking? A lot of exam preparation is just about preparing for the type of questions that you think would be likely to be on the exam. You have to look back at the questions you got incorrectly on your midterm and not only figure out how to work out the questions you got wrong, but also figure out what sort of preparation would have worked better for that exam and consider using that for your next exam.
It’s okay to be upset that you did poorly on your exam. There is nothing wrong with that. For many students, college may be the first time they fail at anything or do poorly even though they spent so much time studying. It happens. Have you ever had a situation where you’ve felt like this before? How did you handle it? Everyone reacts to it differently. Some people need to go and do something else to clear their head. Some people just need to have a good cry to get it out of their system. Some people go out to get their favorite meal or dessert to cheer themselves up. Some people bury themselves in their work, and some people just need to vent. For some people, it helps to talk about it, but others just want to deal with it by themselves. You don’t have to brush it off and bounce back immediately. Figure out how to handle the feelings that can come with a setback like this.
And then after you’ve slept on it and had a little time to deal with those feelings, then you can start to figure out how to do better next time. Go to your professor’s office hours or make an appointment with him to talk about what you can do better. Clearly, there was a misunderstanding in the email, and the professor probably had A LOT of emails from students about their grades so this may have been a knee-jerk reaction on his part. So go in person, and talk to him about what you can do to improve for next time. If time was an issue, then drill problems until you can do them quickly. Googling the type of problem you are working on will probably bring up a lot of resources, but you can also look at other textbooks (your school’s library may have old textbooks that you can use or check out) to get good practice problems.
Do you think it was the way questions were asked that was part of the problem? A lot of students have trouble adjusting to the way tests are written in college. They may be expected to apply their knowledge to a problem they’ve never seen before, or questions may be asked in different ways than they were expecting. If you don’t think your understanding was up-to-par, it may help to get help from a TA or a tutor, if nothing else to hear it explained in a different way than your professor. It can also really help your understanding to teach the material to another person. It can be a student in your class like in a study group, but it can also be a roommate or a friend or even a parent. Saying it out loud to another person can help you identify the parts that you really don’t understand (even though you thought you did), and it can help you to solidify your understanding by forcing you to think about the material in different ways. It can also be a much more active way of studying then just reading the textbook or going over the same homework problems again and again.