— school life and grades.

Hello everyone! So for a majority of us, the beginning of another (perhaps exciting?) school year has arrived and so has all the worrisome stress and plethora of assignments and honestly, some of them can be rather challenging, correct? Anyways, I need to put a conclusion into making this blog post some type of back-to-school essay when what I’m truly here for is to seek for advice. It was just last month when school started for me and I would have to say that I was exhilarated and was engulfed with anticipation—all my new classes, my new locker, seeing all my friends that I’ve longed missed again, meeting some of the new students that decided to enroll to the school, the new teachers...it was really amazing. Lately though, I’ve been bothered by quite a few aspects about school especially tests. First of all, I love school and all of my classmates are well-aware of that and all of them always call me the smartest in the grade (one of them even called me the ‘smartest in the world’ and i was like dude?? what?? u serious??) and I never ever not do any of my homework because it just feels foreign so basically, I’m just very studious. I get excellent grades and I tend to have high expectations of myself to the extent that I’m beginning to loathe failure. However, when it comes to tests, things start to get real. I got both C+’s on two very significant unit tests and got an A- on an extremely easy test that I could’ve totally gotten a perfect one-hundred on. On one of those two unit tests, all the girls in my class all passed with the exception of myself and it made me feel ashamed and despondent and I can guarantee a lot of them were astounded about me failing. It just saddens me and typically when you don’t pass...that must mean that you didn’t make an effort to study at all, right? But the problem is I do study strenuously. Sometimes, I even stay up late just to study even when I don’t have tests or quizzes the subsequent day. Actually, I take back what I mentioned about me having high expectations of myself but my teachers also do as well as my classmates because they know that I’m intelligent and I can just completely ace this exam with flying colors and let me tell you—that’s not true. I’ve been feeling really disappointed of myself lately and I just don’t know why I have difficulties taking examinations...

I always refrain myself from rushing and would always check my answers five times or something just to assure myself that they’re not ludicrous responses. Could the reason be that I feel pressurized that perhaps, there might be a chance that I’ll be the last one finished and everyone’s gonna think I’m dumb or be impatient because they’re waiting for me so I just rush? I don’t know. The thing is, these three tests have mostly been multiple-choice questions and I read somewhere that gifted students have this issue with multiple-choice questions and finding a way to think how some (if not all) of the answers could actually make sense and make the question more complicated and maybe that’s the problem? I pay a lot of attention in class too. I don’t think my problem is my thoughts before taking the test either because I’m usually really confident about it and would never ponder about the negativities. I’ve been telling myself lately, “just start fresh and do your best!” I’m determined to be optimistic!

On that rather extensive note (if any of you actually got down here), do any of you guys think you have an idea on what my issue would be or have any advice that you can share to improve my test-taking abilities? I would really appreciate it—have a wonderful day/night and good luck on your school life too!