What’s one of the most common questions people ask you in college or high school? It’s actually one of the most ignorant and rude, to give a hint.

“What is your GPA?”

Now, when you’re asked this is really what makes it rude or ignorant. A lot of time when you leave high school or you’re in college come home on breaks, this is what people will ask you. When you tell someone you finished your semester, they may just jump straight to asking that. That number then defines you to that person, which is wrong.

You are more than your grades.

There is so much pressure put on getting good grades that sometimes that is all people focus on. Say you get a 2.5 GPA for a semester. If you tell someone that their first assumption will most likely be that you’re not that smart. What they may not know is that possibly you had a family crisis that stressed you out all semester and your grades suffered. Or possibly you were struggling with depression or anxiety and that kept you from studying and your grades suffered. There is a plethora of reasons.

In high school, this pertains a lot to college acceptance. College applications want to see your grades, mainly. Yes, they do look at extracurricular activities, but a big chunk of the reasoning for why you do or don’t get into a school revolves around your grades. But your grades don’t always accurately define you, you are more than your grades.

Maybe junior year was really rough for you, you started to take AP classes but you just weren’t prepared for the workload just yet. Maybe sophomore year you transferred schools and you had no clue what you were doing in your English class and you got a bad grade because of it. Maybe school just gets to you and you have enough and you break down from it. Maybe your life is falling apart but the stigma around school is that you have to keep your grades up.

Now keep in mind, grades are important, I’m not saying they aren’t. Grades show how well you knew something or know how to do something. Learning new things in school also helps expand on our own personal knowledge and helps us decide what careers we want to take on in the future. What is bad is when we let grades totally define and we’re just a number, no longer a person.

Focusing solely on your GPA and what you can do to affect it directly affects your self-worth. If all you care about are the numbers and letters you see on your report card or transcript, you need a serious reality check. You are more than your grades. You’re not ‘3.203 GPA,’ you have a name, use it. Don’t let people, or yourself, focus just on your grades because that is not what is important. You are. Go out, expand your horizons, become a better person. A future employer isn’t going to care that you graduated with a 3.4 GPA, they’re going to care about who you are and what you’ve done.

As finals occur and final grades roll out, keep this in mind. You are more than your grades.