University Woes

[lea_hazel]

Once I got all my grades in I reevaluated my exam choices. Now I'm comparing my (exceptionally low scoring) test paper with the provided solution. Oh teacher, why did you upload your section of the solution in the format of JPEGs? Not one JPEG, several JPEGs, one for each page.

Why do I keep scoring abysmally when I study until I feel like puking and go into the test feeling like I deserve at least a 90? Does this mean I should be rethinking my academic career? I have no idea what I'm doing with my life. I just don't even know if I want someone to swoop in and tell me everything will be fine, or to decide that I'm just a failure as a student and that means I can now relax.

Except I was a damn good programmer and I felt stuck. I felt good about myself because I was doing well at what I did, but I knew I wasn't where I belonged. Maybe the question is, is my sense of belonging worth all the grief of feeling like I'm shit at being a biologist and always will be?

Comments

[marina]

I don't know how this will work out for you and of course you may be built in an entirely different way, but when I was doing psych I ALWAYS felt like I was getting 5-15 points less than where I felt I deserved to be, based on studying till I wanted to puke, based on my feeling of having done well at the exam, etc. For me what I've found is that I do really, really terrible with the sort of multiple choice exams that were common in psych. I'm generally not super good with multiple choice, but something about the exams at psych made them especially difficult. And by difficult I meant that I had to get used to the idea that no matter what, I'd get on average 10 points less than what I should have logically gotten. I would study so hard I knew the material backwards, and still it wouldn't help. And I had a friend who did EXCEPTIONALLY WELL at the sort of multiple choice tests we had, who also worked hard, but got the grades she studied for. We had a thing one day where we'd both been studying together for hours, and then did a mock exam together, and it was amazing, in half the questions I got the wrong answer whereas she got the right one, even though we both knew the material roughly on a similar level.

It's worth noting that as soon as I started writing "open" exams in various other faculties my grades not only improved but became a much more accurate representation of my mental idea of the grades I should get for a given exam.

Maybe that doesn't at all apply to you or maybe your tests are done in completely different ways. But if it's something external that you have no control over, like being bad at the sort of intuition/thinking/whatever that's required for these particular exams then IDK, that's good news and bad? I remember feeling very very frustrated for a really, really long time and then I just accepted it and was like, OK, I just need to know to decrease 10 points from my expected grade, and that's what I'll get, period. And as much as it sucked at least I had something to accept and take into account and work around.