With the rising pressure to succeed felt amongst students today, it’s no wonder that receiving a lower grade than expected may leave many students feeling anxious and defeated.
It’s not the end of the world, however, when the grade on top of your quiz or test isn’t what you had hoped for. There are several different strategies and steps to follow that may help you navigate the process after earning an undesirable grade.
Stay Calm
This is perhaps the most important strategy! It doesn’t help the situation to get caught in a tailspin when a lower grade appears. In fact, it can make the situation even worse. The best thing to do is to take some time to process it and to think about where you may have missed the mark.
Set Up a Meeting with Your Teacher
Schedule a face-to-face meeting (and perhaps once a week until the grade improves) with your teacher or your professor to learn where you went wrong. The teacher is the only person who can tell you, the student, what specifically you might need to work on.
Identify Your Weakness
During these meetings, listen to your teacher and try to identify the area in which you were weak. Too often, a student is simply not studying or preparing homework effectively. Perhaps if it’s a math test, you might be having trouble with the word problems or with English, you might have trouble summarizing the novel you just finished. Whatever it is, you’re well on your way to fixing the weakness by taking the first simple step of acknowledging them.
Learn HOW You are Preparing for Tests
Once you identify the areas where you need to improve, review with your teacher how best to prepare for your test. There are many different methods to preparing for a test. Maybe it’s studying in a group, organizing the material into categories, or even creating detailed outlines of your notes to fall back on and to review. Additionally, you may find it beneficial to teach the material to a friend or to a family member. By teaching your subject matter out loud, you are learning and retaining it all at the same time.
Tackle it Next Time
When all is said and done and you’ve followed and devoted time to the above steps, there is not much else that you can do until that next quiz or test. When the time does arrive for the next quiz or test, get a good night’s sleep, try to eat breakfast and go into it with confidence knowing you have prepared as best as you could!
Unsatisfactory grades, unfortunately, and most likely, will be part of every student’s experience at one point or another throughout your academic experience. It’s important to remember that it’s just one grade and by implementing the above strategies, you’re sure to gain confidence in your subject matter for a more positive and rewarding outcome.
