I've been there too.
Making less-than-perfect grades can crush your self-esteem and make it incredibly hard to motivate yourself during future semesters. Grades are just as much good as they are evil, and it can be difficult to see a GPA as anything other than menacing when your family, friends, or professors seem to expect so much from you.
Stress surrounding grades remains one of the biggest issues in an undergraduate's life. According to a study conducted by Ross, Neibling and Heckert and the New York Times, intellectual ability is a little over 51% of the reason why college students experience stress.
Worse than that, GPAs only keep rising. In an article for USA Today, Cara Newlon explains, "The average GPA at four-year colleges and universities has risen from 2.52 in the 1950s to 3.11 in 2006." This may seem like an insane improvement, but, at the same time, it presents a fundamental problem: students must obtain B's or higher in order to meet the bare minimum.
Society no longer sees an average GPA as average. Even high school students, preparing for college, push themselves with rigorous AP classes, dual-enrollment at accredited universities, and over-studying for the SAT and ACT. The problem with this modern phenomenon is that college students identify themselves by their GPA. Without a 4.0, some students may feel increasingly inadequate.
This feeling of inadequacy may, then, fuel dropping out of college or mental illnesses such as anxiety and depression. A study released by the National Alliance on Mental Illness found that 62% of students who withdrew from college withdrew because of mental health problems. The issue of grades now not only affects GPA, but it heavily affects mental health.
In light of this astounding research, it is imperative that students stop placing so much stock into their GPA's. Degrees can be obtained without keeping a 4.0 all four (or five or six) years of college. Just because you don't have fancy Latin words behind your name at graduation does not mean you can't be successful.
This is a truth that we must wholeheartedly stand by as more and more students decide to pursue higher education. While a 4.0 GPA and those fancy Latin words may bring intense satisfaction to those that receive them, that does not mean that universities, professors, friends, and family need to expect that from everyone.
In my five years of college, I've experienced incredible satisfaction and debilitating defeat, in terms of my grades, but something that I have learned from this is some of my greatest intellectual moments came after making a grade I didn't necessarily enjoy making. This semester I made all A's, which is something I haven't achieved in a while.
My GPA is nowhere near a 4.0, but my essays have never been better than they are right now, as I near graduation. As an English major, I value unique thought and clever arguments; I like reading, writing, and researching more than I like anything else. This means that I didn't make good grades in my foreign language classes, astronomy, or government, but that isn't a fact that I lose sleep over.
Getting a degree in what you love does not require A's in every single subject. That doesn't mean that striving for good grades and a good GPA isn't inherently wrong, but that pressure needs to be alleviated. For anyone who has a 4.0: keep rocking it, and for anyone who has less than that: your worth isn't less than the person rocking that 4.0. College is filled with seasons of discovery, so let this be another season. Take care of yourselves, and stop defining every part of your life by a decimal.
