My little sister is a bad test-taker. She’s really smart. But she’s bad at taking exams. I kind of understand how she feels because I’m the same way. It’s worse for her and I can easily see that because she’s smarter than I am yet still does worse than I do. She didn’t meet expectations in her IGCSEs and she’s not taking that very well.
I know what it feels like to try hard and not do as well as you had hoped. It happened with my IB exams then it happened again with my degree. For six weeks I studied all day long every day yet when my results came out they were disappointing. I was heartbroken because I had left those exams thinking I submitted excellent work. There was nothing I could do about it. I had completed all my credits. Third year was over. That degree classification was going to be typed on my certificate no matter what. All I could do was email my lecturers asking for detailed feedback on my performance so that I don’t repeat the same mistakes.
I can only recall one time when I did better than I expected in an exam. It was Psychology. I had done very well in my coursework which counted for 40% of my final grade and I had studied thoroughly and practiced the MOCK questions the professor gave us. But when I went into the exam hall and looked at my question paper, I almost threw up all over it. All the questions came out of left field. They were nothing like what she told us to expect. So I took my pen and I started bullshitting. By the time I left that exam I was totally worn out and I felt violated. Every one just kept asking, “You guys! What the fuck was that?” I thought I had failed. Utterly and completely. But then my results came out and I did okay. Granted it was the lowest grade I got that entire year but it was still 10 times better than what I was expecting.
My point is sometimes you’re lucky and you do well despite your low expectations. Other times you work hard and you still fail. We can’t always control it as much as we would want to. Sometimes you can study and know 80% of the literature back to front, but then the teacher decides to test you on the other 20% that you couldn’t possibly have gotten to. Yes, you have to study hard and study efficiently, but you also have to be lucky. It all goes to show you the flaws of standardized testing and examination conditions in general. This is why I prefer coursework. Exams are so unnatural. They make it count for such a high percentage of your grade, build up the pressure then give you 2 hours to do your best. Not every one can write an excellent essay from start to finish in under 2 hours. I don’t know why lecturers who have the freedom to choose how students are assessed willingly continue to read rubbish written in rubbish handwriting.
This is just the way things are. You can’t keep crying about it, you just have to move on. My sister’s year is the second to write IGCSE at her school. This means that it’s not totally her fault that she didn’t do well because her teachers are still learning how to teach the curriculum. When I wrote the IB exams, my form was the first to do it at my college. Nobody did well. None of us got our predicted grades. Now when they publish the grades in alumni newsletters I see that the performances have greatly improved so it wasn’t totally my fault that I didn’t do well.
I used to wallow and get demotivated after receiving a bad grade. After IB (when I didn’t score anything within the vicinity of my predicted grades) I was miserable. I isolated myself and I barely attended any classes in my first year of university. When I talked about it to my lecturer in retrospect, he called me a child and he was right. The mature way to look at failure – cliche as this is – is an opportunity for growth.
