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You are here: Home / Opinion / A reminder: You are not your GPA

A reminder: You are not your GPA

November 14, 2018 by Andersonian Staff

If you’re attending college, one thing must ring true: academics are important to you.

Maybe it’s your passion, maybe it’s your dream or maybe you didn’t really have a choice. Regardless, your grades matter. You want to succeed, and you’ll try your best. But what happens when your best just isn’t enough?

Sometimes we make mistakes. Maybe you completely forgot about an assignment that was due yesterday or you didn’t get the grade you wanted on a test you spent all night studying for.

These things happen and they have an impact on our GPA, but we can’t let them impact our sense of self-worth.

Studies have shown that today’s college students are facing greater levels of stress that at any time in U.S. history.

In an environment where academic achievement is prized and celebrated, it can be easy to negatively internalize a missing assignment or a bad grade, so it’s important to remember that you are more than your GPA.

Your grades are not indicative of your worth or capabilities. If you scored poorly on a test, that doesn’t mean you don’t know anything. If you got a low grade on a paper, that doesn’t mean you can’t write. If you slept through your alarm and didn’t make it to class, that doesn’t mean you’re lazy.

It just means that you make mistakes, because you’re not perfect, you’re human. And just like every other human, you have endless potential.

You have the potential to achieve despite your failures or shortcomings. You have the potential to learn, grow and succeed, no matter how you may have messed up.

In fact, some of the greatest successes have been born from failure. Pencillin, anyone?

As Thanksgiving and Christmas near, many students are in the midst of the busiest, most awful part of the semester. It’s funny how this time is also the time we are supposed to be brimming with gratitude and thankfulness.

When the sun goes down on this fall semester and grades have been placed on AccessAU, some people will inevitably rush to see how they’ve faired; others will, no doubt, ignore them for days, weeks, maybe even months. The grades matter, they do.

But they don’t matter nearly as much as your mental health.

And they don’t matter nearly as much as your family, your friends, your community.

We should all strive for excellence and for grades we can be proud of, but grades are not the end-all-be-all. As soon as you cross that stage and accept your diploma, your GPA no longer matters.

Making sure that you make it to that stage in one piece, however, does.

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The Andersonian, the student newspaper of Anderson University, Anderson, Ind., publishes a print edition and maintains this website. As a matter of institutional policy, the University administration does not review or edit Andersonian content prior to publication. The student editors are responsible for both print and online content. While the administration recognizes the role of the student press on a college campus and in journalism education, the views expressed in the Andersonian are not necessarily those of Anderson University.

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