Your grades will drop, (and why it's not the end of the world)

Your early marks don’t define you as a student

ARIANA LONGLEY

It's okay if your grades aren't as good as they were in high school. CREDIT: PEXELS

WELCOME TO UNIVERSITY. A completely new ball game. Gone are your high school days, when your teachers adjusted the due date of assignments because they coincide with a due date in your other classes. Welcome to a world where 80 per cent of your tests are smooshed within a two week period around Halloween and Christmas. And just when you think you’ve made it through exams, you realize that your usually high grades have fallen into a pit of despair.

In high school, I considered myself an infallible genius. I did nothing to deserve the above 85 per cent average I received in every class (including math, and math literally terrified me). I didn’t look at my assignments until the day before handing them in and my exam study ritual was even more disastrous.

It entailed drinking a pot of espresso before picking up my notes for the first time at 9 p.m. the night before the test, accidentally falling asleep while attempting to read my notes and brush my teeth, then waking up on the bathroom floor with a toothbrush in my right hand and a binder in my left — 15 minutes before having to leave for school.

During the first semester of my undergrad at the University of Toronto, I assumed my rock and roll academic style would propel me to the top of my cohort like it did throughout high school. I made no effort to do any readings and didn’t know when or what midterms were until 24 hours before my first one. (By the way, university has midterms and you should know when and what they are).

My marks reflected my study and assignment style. I almost failed most of my classes, but not because I was stupid or lazy. I did what I did because these tactics worked for me in grades nine to 12.

High school didn’t prepare me for what to expect in university.

It didn’t teach effective work strategies or give me an accurate picture of post-secondary. The objective of high school is to gather the knowledge base you need to succeed in university. The objective of university, in addition to building on that information, is to learn how to learn and develop soft skills like time management and independent critical thinking. While slowly building my soft skills, the fatal blow to my grades came in the form of first year program prerequisites. As a freshman biology student, I had to take chemistry and calculus and I sucked at both of them.

I applied for my biology degree because I was interested in ecology and evolution, not orbitals and derivatives. This may all sound bleak, but there is hope of reaching a decent academic standing (the carrot dangled at the end of the stick).

As you advance through your university career, you gain more freedom to enroll in courses you both enjoy and are good at, which will help push those grades slowly up, to a less nerve-racking place.

It’s scary when you can’t reach your previous academic standards, but that’s okay. It’s normal to slip up a little in the beginning. In fact, almost everyone expects you to. Most jobs you’ll apply for don’t care about your grades, and if they do, they expect to see a fluctuation in grades as you adjusted to university. Most grad schools only look at the last eight credits of your undergrad.

That doesn’t mean you should stop trying for good grades in your first year, (you should definitely try), but it gives you some time to figure out what works for you. Use this period to learn how to learn and develop skills that not only boost your marks, but help you retain information and make you more valuable on the job market after graduation. Your grades may slip the first couple of years, but that doesn’t mean you can’t hoist them back up again.