<p>I am currently majoring in Bio engineer. I just finished up my Economy-Engineer test and i realized that i fail the test! I am so despressed right now, i dont know if i still get an A in that class. I need some advise, and this is also my first year in college</p>
<p>Some advice would be that you are almost certainly not going to get straight A’s in college, so don’t get too bent out of shape about it. A few B’s and even a C or two is not going to kill your future.</p>
<p>This is just mid-term and you already are giving up?..</p>
<p>This is exactly why those slightly above-average high school students tend to do better with difficult majors, like engineering, in college than do top high school students. They’re more likely to remain level-headed after receiving a poor grade, and are usually more logical (rather than emotional) with regards to making positive changes to their habits. These are the kids that fly through the first year weed-out courses with mediocre-to-decent grades, but with steady and consistent GPA increases throughout their years at school. They don’t get discouraged because of one test. They don’t consider dropping out of their major because of one test. They tend to stick it out and learn from their mistakes.</p>
<p>The bottom line here is that you need to avoid being a self-perfectionist. You will end up quickly burning yourself out, and possibly having a career crisis as you start second-guessing your abilities. Learn to adapt to the situation at hand. Learn your weaknesses (i.e. study habits? motivation? etc) and work on ways to improve them. Consider your first year a learning experience all together. It’s really a transition period where you fine-tune your study habits, and learn what’s important and what’s not.</p>
<p>Also, and I can’t stress this enough… Get out and have fun once and a while. Do non-school related things. Go rock climbing, go mountain biking, build model rockets with your friends. The fun stuff helps you remain cool and collected, so that you have more energy and motivation to get through your school work.</p>
<p>Figure out why you did poorly on the test. Most high school students are used to relatively easy tests and thus have a hard time adjusting to college tests where the prof is really try to spread out the distribution of grades. So many do not have good study skills or they may study for long enough periods but not in the right way.
1-find out how everyone else did. Perhaps you “failed” but so did most everybody else.
2-If it isn’t obvious to you what you did wrong or how to fix it, talk to the professor, the TA, and to some upperclassmen in your major. Visit the student help center or tutoring center or whatever your school has.
3- like everyone else has said, you are not in high school anymore. The courses are harder, the tests are harder and the competition is at a different level. Adjust your expectations. As the president of my son’s college said to the entering freshmen: “For half of you, this will be the first time in your life that you are in the bottom half of your class!”. Words of wisdom. He was trying to prepare them for the emotional blow of not being the smartest kid in the school anymore. And to warn them that they may need to ask for help from professors and fellow students.</p>
<p>I think people sometimes tend be a little too results-oriented about studying. Sometimes a test just doesn’t go well for reasons that are more or less out of our control and there’s no sense in going on tilt about it and changing the way we do things. </p>
<p>I am also a big advocate of taking time to rest. Maybe a no work after 10pm policy and a mandatory day off if possible. </p>
<p>Like, I was getting a bit burnt out this semester, so I’ve started forcing myself to do more of my recurring work during previously wasted downtime so that I can make Sunday a day where I just chill out and maybe do the weekly extra credit puzzle problems that I like doing anyway. </p>
<p>I also stop working on stuff at night as soon as I feel like I’m not working efficiently enough (10 generally at the latest, unless there is a big project that I have been irresponsible about), and then I just smoke a little or something to make sure I unwind and have a pleasant night before bed. </p>
<p>Basically I find it’s more efficient to put energy into making sure I stay motivated to study in such a way that’s been proven to work than it is to put that energy into figuring out some genius new brain tricks for making learning easier. As long as you feel good enough about school to be happy reading the chapters, working the problems and taking roadblocks to office hours, you should be fine.</p>
<p>It took me until recently to realize that I can’t always get perfect grades, and that if I let it bother me, I’ll be worse off in the end for it. It doesn’t matter how much one studies, and honestly it doesn’t always matter how well one understands what’s going on in the course. You can’t control every single situation - but that’s really okay.</p>
<p>I truly feel like I’m toward (if not AT) the top of my current physics class, for example. When this semester first started, I put my all in this class (and the others, too, of course). I studied A LOT. I did ALL of the homework extra early and then looked over it multiple times. I made sure I understood all of the concepts and could do all of the math. I practiced and practiced, even after I was POSITIVE I knew it all. Test time came, and I did very well. However, the lab reports were handed back (worth as much as the test) and I got a B. Still a good grade, but it bothered me because I worked so hard! I looked through to see what I missed…</p>
<p>I got EVERY “physics” problem correct. The professor just wasn’t a fan of my rounding (got it wrong if I put 3.05 instead of 3.047, for example) and said my written procedure wasn’t detailed enough. Example: Let’s say one of the steps in the experiment was to measure the mass of something using a balance. If I wrote “Measure the mass in grams of…” I would get points knocked off for not writing “Measure the mass in grams of … using a balance”.</p>
<p>No matter how hard I try, I have ALWAYS missed something on a lab report that you wouldn’t think really mattered when you were turning it in. I got a lab back today and got a 94 on it for the same reasons. Rounding and a procedure that wasn’t “perfect”. Two weeks ago I would have beat myself up over it. I realize there’s nothing really bad about this situation. At the end of the semester I’ll have a good final grade, and I will be able to say that I both tried my best and came out with a lot of knowledge that I didn’t initially have.</p>
<p>Just don’t let some bad grades upset you. Sure, my story wasn’t exactly like yours. I’ve failed tests before too, though. My first semester I failed two major tests in a math course - an “easy” math course. I was so shocked! I regret letting it get to me. You have plenty of time to make up for this one little bad grade.</p>
<p>Welcome to engineering. Pray for a curve :)</p>