Many of you reading this have and are making great decisions. You sit in the front of class, have good attendance, take good notes and skip out on bar hopping for either Welfare Wednesdays or Thirsty Thursdays. But your hard work didn’t seem to pay off on one of your exams. Now you can only sing Lil Wayne’s song “No Worries” but can’t relate because “It’s Weezy F Baby, and the F is for…” #FAIL! There are tips and tricks to pulling that grade back up, but the hopes and dreams of achieving an A are a lot like the title of Drake’s first mixtape, “So Far Gone.” But wait! You just remembered your professor drops your lowest exam grade. Shouldn’t this be an option in every class?
Duh! Look, I’m no fan of grades. They’re not always an accurate reflection of what a student learned in class. For instance, a student could fail every exam throughout the semester yet earn an A on their final–a cumulative review. And their final grade is a C but they’ve clearly mastered the material. That makes me “Feel Some Type of Way” (Rich Homie Quan).
Grades are an evaluation. I’m not suggesting they’re an unfair evaluation. The problem, however, is that grades do not depict a student’s progression through the semester. Rather, grades seem to depict how much information a student can retain from one lesson to the next. This is why we’re so accustomed to learning only the material we need leading up to each individual exam and regurgitating whatever knowledge we spent cramming into our brains.
Fs cause stress, so we become more focused on avoiding bad grades rather than critically thinking or even furthering our knowledge on a subject. This discourages us from applying what we’ve learned outside of the class environment. Why would any of that matter when, at the end of the day, our GPA is all that seems to count?
So drop our lowest test and only consider the rest!
