164. Do you believe that your academic record accurately reflects your abilities? Explain.
I recently got my report card back and my grades were good. I would have liked them to be better but there’s nothing I can do about it now. Looking at this question and having my grades at the back of my mind, I keep having a flashback of the first thing I heard as a freshman in high school.
I walked into my math class to have a tall man with round glasses and a white beard towering down at me. I smiled politely and took my seat next to my friends. After the bell rang he started talking … and talking, and talking. It was a never-ending speech. Quite frankly, I was a bit bored and I started dozing off. But then, someone from the back of the room asked, “How many tests do you give in your class?” That got me wide-awake. Yes, I was bored, but I did go to school everyday to learn. I hated the idea of giving tests and I wanted to know how many this teacher would be giving us. His answer was simple; he said he had to follow the Woodstock guidelines. I sunk back down disappointedly in my seat. He went on about the tests, but then something he said caught my attention. He said that he didn’t believe in tests, but had to give them because of the format. He said that “tests don’t determine how smart you are, instead it determines how well you prepared for the test.” That has stuck with me until this very day, and will stick with me for the rest of my life.
I went to check my grades up on the school website and surprisingly enough, I found that all my averages of assignments and essays and application assignments were either a B+ or higher, my test averages were always much lower. I was bewildered. I wasn’t a horrible test taker; I would say I’m average. But I never realized that until I carefully analyzed my grades. Most of my teachers say that I’m good with my applications though I tend to steer to far sometimes, but I just thought every teacher would say that.
My semester grades are always much better than my exam grade. I know that I can use what I learn and apply it in the real world and make sense of everything I learn and connect it to my life, to reality, to a piece of toast, but I can’t show them in my overall grades somehow. So to sum up, my academic record doesn’t reflect my intellectual abilities well enough. Yes in some cases they do; for example, physics. I’m not good at physics at all. I don’t understand the concepts, so therefore, I can’t apply them anywhere. Not in my experiment reports, my quizzes, my tests, my exams or my grades. But physics is the only exception.
I hope that colleges look at the semester grades instead of the overall grade and might be surprised to see that many students could potentially be going through similar things. But then again, this is a far-fetched idea. Who has the time to go through all that trouble? Someone students are just good overall and in tests. These people can’t be competed with.
I recently got my report card back and my grades were good. I would have liked them to be better but there’s nothing I can do about it now. Looking at this question and having my grades at the back of my mind, I keep having a flashback of the first thing I heard as a freshman in high school.
I walked into my math class to have a tall man with round glasses and a white beard towering down at me. I smiled politely and took my seat next to my friends. After the bell rang he started talking … and talking, and talking. It was a never-ending speech. Quite frankly, I was a bit bored and I started dozing off. But then, someone from the back of the room asked, “How many tests do you give in your class?” That got me wide-awake. Yes, I was bored, but I did go to school everyday to learn. I hated the idea of giving tests and I wanted to know how many this teacher would be giving us. His answer was simple; he said he had to follow the Woodstock guidelines. I sunk back down disappointedly in my seat. He went on about the tests, but then something he said caught my attention. He said that he didn’t believe in tests, but had to give them because of the format. He said that “tests don’t determine how smart you are, instead it determines how well you prepared for the test.” That has stuck with me until this very day, and will stick with me for the rest of my life.
I went to check my grades up on the school website and surprisingly enough, I found that all my averages of assignments and essays and application assignments were either a B+ or higher, my test averages were always much lower. I was bewildered. I wasn’t a horrible test taker; I would say I’m average. But I never realized that until I carefully analyzed my grades. Most of my teachers say that I’m good with my applications though I tend to steer to far sometimes, but I just thought every teacher would say that.
My semester grades are always much better than my exam grade. I know that I can use what I learn and apply it in the real world and make sense of everything I learn and connect it to my life, to reality, to a piece of toast, but I can’t show them in my overall grades somehow. So to sum up, my academic record doesn’t reflect my intellectual abilities well enough. Yes in some cases they do; for example, physics. I’m not good at physics at all. I don’t understand the concepts, so therefore, I can’t apply them anywhere. Not in my experiment reports, my quizzes, my tests, my exams or my grades. But physics is the only exception.
I hope that colleges look at the semester grades instead of the overall grade and might be surprised to see that many students could potentially be going through similar things. But then again, this is a far-fetched idea. Who has the time to go through all that trouble? Someone students are just good overall and in tests. These people can’t be competed with.
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