As the midterm season is closing, some of you may have had a successful exam month while others may not have done as well as anticipated. If you have failed an exam or did below average, it is essential to reflect on the past exam and move forward with a positive attitude onto the next exam. I will evaluate some ways that you can regain your motivation and confidence after failing an exam.
The first thing to make sure of if you failed an exam is to acknowledge that it is okay, that we all have our moments of shortcoming and that there will be more exams that we have the opportunity to excel on. One exam will not deter nor determine the rest of your semester—so as much as it might hurt at the moment, that feeling will pass. Once you’ve accepted that everything is going to be okay, you can move on to planning for the next exam.
Since you already know how it feels to fail an exam, you are going to want to take the knowledge acquired from that exam and apply it to the following exam. To do this, you can take a look at the study tips you used in the past and change them a bit. For example, if you crammed all your knowledge the day before the exam, maybe next time around begin studying a week in advance. Also, you can evaluate the setting before the exam, so if in the past you stayed up late the night before, you can now change it to going to bed earlier to ensure you get enough sleep.
The next thing you can do to recollect your motivation is to visit your professor. Most of the time speaking with your professor about how you felt about the exam or on what you missed can help you evaluate where you went wrong and how you can improve it for next time. Also, the professor will most likely reassure you that it is not the end of the world and provide you with study tips or things to cover for the next exam.
Finally, you can talk with your peers to see how they felt on the exam or how they studied. Talking with your peers and admitting that you didn’t do your best on this exam will make you feel like you’re not alone because it is more likely that once you recognize your downfall, your peers will be comfortable acknowledging that they too have failed or done poorly on an exam.
Ultimately it is essential to acknowledge that one failed test doesn’t mean that you will fail all the other exams, it’s just a little hiccup in the journey of college — it is essential to pick yourself back up and continue trying!