Dealing with Bad Grades or Exam Results

I received a few messages from students who were disappointed by their final grades and wanted my advice on how to cope. So let’s look at the symptom first, and then the disease.

The symptom — Unhappy with results

Whenever I feel bad about something, I think about how I can remedy the situation and/or learn from it. After that, I ask whether it will be of any further use to continue to feel bad about it. If not (which is usually the case), I simply choose not to feel bad about it anymore.

Getting ‘bad’ exam results can be a good thing so long as we use it to motivate ourselves to work harder next time (if that’s what we really want). However, we can choose not to feel bad about our results (which are now completely beyond our control).

This idea that we can choose our thoughts or emotions might seem ridiculous to those of us who aren’t used to thinking this way. You might be interested in learning more about stoicism (a school of thought that has seen a resurgence in recent years) for more information.