I don’t know about you, but for me, there will be tears when I look at my final grades.
Hopefully, tears of joy as I look and see that I didn’t fail anything and my hard work throughout dead and finals week (and the entire semester) paid off. This was my hardest semester so far and I can’t wait for it to be over with, and it will be as long as I passed all of my classes. I definitely have that fear though that I may not have done so well in a class, and I will either have to retake it or accept the low GPA.
For me and for many, grades and finals are terrifying. You can walk out of a test feeling great, but you still can’t be sure if you did well enough to get the grade you wanted. Did you really just ace that final? Or did you accidentally bomb it? Pulling up my.wsu (or whatever your school uses) is always the hardest part because whatever letters are on that page – they can’t be changed. You just have to know you did everything you could to try and get them as high as possible. It sucks when you pull them up and you definitely didn’t do as well as you would have liked, or hoped. Sometimes that means accepting the low grade and GPA, or in the worst cases – retaking it. Though, retaking a class isn’t all terrible; hopefully, you will be able to better understand the concepts and materials and do much better. But it could also mean that you are stuck having to stay an extra semester, which for some can be an extra $42,000 (hello, out-of-state tuition…). Grades aren’t always bad though, sometimes you end up doing better than you thought you would, or you find out the professor curves the class a little more than expected so you manage to pull it up to that + or the next letter (always a blessing) – or hey, maybe you even managed to ace more of your finals than you thought (go you!). Whatever the outcome is, the moment before seeing the results can be terrifying.
Another thing to be excited about with final grades coming out is that means that the semester is over! I don’t know if it was just me and the people I’ve talked to but this semester seemed to be pretty hard for everyone. Whatever my grades might be, I’m just glad the semester is over. I feel like so many bad things happened this semester (and even this year), I don’t know where to begin. There were problems within the campus, the community, the state, the nation, and even with the world. Hopefully, with the end of 2016 and the New Year approaching, nothing more will happen… I think 2016 has been eventful enough.
No matter if this was your first semester, your last semester, or some semester in between, it is always nice to have it behind you with a break and a new semester ahead.
