Sheoli Lele ‘26 is a prospective math and philosophy double major. She uses her free time to paint, take photos around campus and debate.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own.
I earned two C’s in my first semester of college.
After deleting and retyping that sentence many times, I realized that the lessons I learned from earning these grades are valuable enough to share, at the price of my own embarrassment. This article offers not only reassurance for a potential source of insecurity if it applies, but also new perspectives on the true implications of academic grades. Earning subpar grades is not always a bad thing and, in many ways, will actually be of benefit. Here is why you, as a student, should avoid beating yourself up for past semesters’ grades and instead work to internalize its upsides.
Upon earning a less-than-ideal grade, people tend to jump to the conclusion that they are “just bad” at a given subject or that their “brain doesn’t work that way.” I have heard it from friends and even have had the thought myself.
Step zero of making any improvement is to acknowledge that change is possible and that we sometimes can impede our own success by making hasty, unproductive and illogical judgments about our abilities. Aside from academic content, each course has a unique set of characteristics, the simplest of which are instructor, time of day, the rest of the student’s course load and extracurriculars. These, along with their more complex counterparts — like mental health and ability to respond to stress — are characteristics that not even a different section of the same course can share. With so many factors affecting your final letter grade, how can you put all the causal weight on your “natural ability” to do something? While your natural inclinations may be one factor in academic outcomes, you will only waste time by focusing so heavily on this self-defeating thought. A better use of your time would be to consider what changes you could make to boost your future performance, regardless of ‘inherent’ ability.
This advice especially applies if you retake the class; instead of dreading being tasked with something that “doesn’t come naturally” to you, look forward to learning content you are at least familiar with. Underclassmen often retake classes they took in high school (e.g. Advanced Placement and dual enrollment courses) and perform better in college than they did in high school. Why not think of redoing a college course like this? I see no major difference in the two yet notice that there is more shame associated with retaking classes taken for the first time in college.
For these future classes, the best thing to do is to put extra work into the first assignments of the semester and begin studying early. After all, one of psychology’s most effective study tips is to make multiple passes over content to retain it better.
Another reason not to dwell over bad past grades is that grades are not the best indicators of proficiency with course material. A friend at another college told me that despite her exam average of 87% in introductory physics, she earned a D overall in the course because she missed the deadlines of many problem sets that had heavier weight distribution in grading. In this case, it was her time management skills rather than her understanding of the content that is reflected in the final letter grade.
Others may have more complex or multifaceted reasons for earning grades they dislike — I definitely did. The reality is that we operate in a system in which earning good grades is prioritized over true learning. Even for students who earn As in a class, there is a probability but not a guarantee that they have a truly strong grasp of the material.
I also find that people who initially struggled in a course but eventually mastered its content are far better teachers than those who had always found the material easy. The former understands not only the beginner’s gaps in knowledge and how to close them, but also how it feels to have obstacles to learning. They seem to be far more empathetic and thorough when helping others. For this reason, I prefer doing work for my computer science class with fellow beginners over someone who picked up coding in early high school and is majoring in computer science. For the same reason, I prefer learning from classmates rather than going to office hours of professors who, while deeply knowledgeable and passionate, understand my difficulties less.
Additionally, if you earn a grade that you are not proud of, universities have protocols meant to help you respond semesters later. For example, students at the College of William and Mary’s Raymond A. Mason School of Business can retroactively change a grade to pass/fail starting the fall semester of their third year in college up until they apply for graduation. In fact, they can do this for two classes per semester, unless the classes are either in their major or part of the COLL curriculum.
Clearly, so many students have earned grades that were lower than they would have liked or else such protocols would not have been implemented. You are not alone, and part of moving forward is realizing that you have many avenues of support here at the College.