My struggles with getting A's

BernWillChris
Wed, 01 Apr 2015 19:01:30 +0000

Hi fellow students,

I'm a second year undergraduate student and I had initial goals of graduating with a high GPA so that I can go to an even more selective university for grad school. I'm a hardcore fan of believing that everyone should be given the absolute right to control their destiny, even if that means going to an Ivy League University. I know universities have multiple criteria that they look at:

GPA, Exams,Talents, Diversity and more.

My first year was a nightmare. I only got one A and the rest were B's and C's. I did good with my homework and labs, but it was a troubled area, which was my exam scores. I'm here to admit that I'm not the best exam taker and is far from the worst as well; you see, because exams make up as high as 90%, maybe even higher of your final grade, you need to have an A AVERAGE for the midterms and finals. Let say that you had 2 exams for a particular course and you got an 80 on the first, "BOOM!!!," you now cannot get an A in that class. You would seriously have to get 100% on your next exam just to get a 90 and sometimes, that isn't enough.

There can be multiple reasons why people failed to do as high as they would had liked: test anxiety, headache, and simple mistakes. I was originally thinking about majoring in Electrical Engineering since I had a career as an electrician. Due to the fact that it is so so easy to make a mistake from calculations, I had to change course from something that I wanted to major in to Economics.

You probably remember me saying earlier that my first year were B's and C's. That would put me at a 2 point something GPA. The GPA system isn't as great as it was from high school where your GPA was you actual average. They didn't do the crap about weighing your C's more than your B's and etc. Do I feel that the GPA system is fair? Yes I do because my whole school is on that crap. Do I feel cheated by it? Yes I do. Let say I get like an 87 in a class, I will get 3 points out of a possible of 4. Those 3 points are really them averaging a 75 instead of an 87. This GPA system starts cheating you once you get out of the A range, which been difficult for me to achieve because I'm not a perfect test-taker.

I'm about to end with this. I took a break this semester and didn't pick difficult courses. It appears that I might get straight A's this semester, but you never know until you get back your report. I just feel stressed and also feel like I'm walking on a thin line heading from one skyscraper to the next. I make one mistake and "BOOM!!," there go my A in the class. If you can relate to this, please respond. I would like to know that I'm not the only good student that have great work ethic that can't achieve his goals because of the inability to get an above 90 test average. The first year was bad, but I thought that my test scores would improve and it becoming more and more apparent that this is just who I'm with test taking; no matter how well I know the stuff, silly mistakes and test anxiety will prove a match for my goals. Also, GPA and exams scores are very important to universities. And guess what, you need to be an excellent test-taker to get those, even for the GPA, as you now aware of. I feel that students should be able to get an A in a class with a B test average if everything else is perfect. They should give less than perfect test-takers some hope. Thanks for reading.

P.S. I couldn’t find a more appropriate topic to put this thread.