Finals: the dreaded end to every student’s semester. Whether you are in high school, college, or graduate school, you definitely understand the stress and frustration. Now that I have completed my first semester of college at Indiana University, I can vouch that high school finals are nothing like college finals. College is hands down much more stressful and time-consuming. Here are some things I learned after taking my first set of finals as a college freshman:
1. Professors will not care if you do not put in the effort.
Contrary to the warnings that “your professor isn’t going to care about you” or that “you will just be a number in college," your professors do care. However, they are not going to hunt you down or chase after you if you aren’t putting in the effort. They will always be there to help and answer questions as long as you want to learn, but if you can’t care less about your grades, your professors will not either. If you do badly on your final, the blame is on you, not your professor.
2. Usually, professors will round you up if you’re close to the next letter grade.
In most cases, if you’re at say, a 79.9 percent, the professor will be kind and round you up to an 80 percent — as long as you’ve been a good student throughout the semester. In high school, teachers aren’t usually that nice. But college professors will almost always help you out with your final grade if you’ve put in the effort to deserve it.
3. College GPAs have a completely different value than high school GPAs.
College is obviously much harder than high school. You have more free time, more work to manage, and classes that are at a higher level of difficulty. That being said, there is more information to learn, and it requires a lot more studying. Because of this, GPAs are viewed differently in college. It was fairly normal to have somewhere between a 3.6 and 4.0 GPA in high school; it meant you were well off, and would be successful at getting into a good college. In college, however, it's very difficult to get a GPA that high (although it's not impossible), and a more “normal” college GPA would be somewhere between a 2.8 and 3.4. That being said, its still important to work just as hard—if not harder—than you did in high school, because college matters way more than high school did.
4. Studying is extremely important.
You might have been able to get by with minimal studying in high school, but that won’t fly in college. If you want to do well on your finals — and all other exams, for that matter — studying is a must. You get out of college what you put into it, and you will not get good grades on your finals if you don’t buckle down and put in the effort to study for them. As awful as it is, the pain of finals week is only temporary, and you’ll be happy you worked hard when you benefit from the reward that comes from studying.
