With the right perspective, this will be nothing but positive in terms of your preparation for college. Including admissions, but also, and even more importantly, doing well in college itself.
For context, it is unrealistic to expect you will never experience any sort of struggle in any class, either during high school or college. Indeed, I would dare say if that never happens, you probably are not challenging yourself enough.
So a big part of scholastic success is learning how to productively deal with situations like this. And there is a lot involved.
Most obviously, you have to learn how to identify the nature of the problem, and get appropriate help as necessary.
But just as important, you have to learn how to deal with all this mentally and emotionally. Without going too far into a long digression, humans evolved to have a stress reaction because it was helpful in situations where we were trying to chase down prey, avoid predators, and so on. Our brain chemistry literally changes in ways designed to help us do critical physical activities.
In modern civilization, that stress reaction can still be triggered. Like, in this case, good grades are juicy prey, harsh graders are dangerous predators, and so on. But we don’t always have good ways of moderating that reaction and completing what is sometimes known as the stress cycle. Here is one illustration of that concept:
OK, but good news, if you feel stress and anxiety in situations like this, there is absolutely nothing wrong with you. And with some deliberate practice you can get much better at dealing with stress, and completing the stress cycle. Different people find different things work for them (see the box “Engaging the Ventral Vagus”), so it can take some experimentation to learn what works for you.
But that means the sooner you start that process of learning how to deal with these situations more productively, the better! And so what you are experiencing now in 8th grade is happening plenty of time in advance of actual college, such that you can learn a lot and be very well-prepared when college comes along. Indeed, you can probably get quite far down this path in high school, before you are actually applying to college.
So seriously, it is good and not bad you are experiencing something like this now. Just focus on how this is a great opportunity to start building some really important skills and habits not only for future scholastic success, but really life success in general.