Grades are only a reflection of how well you play the academic game, not how smart you are or how much you learned. They only really matter in the academic realm, not outside it.
Check out the section on Triage in Steve's post
Ten Tips for College Students.
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Originally Posted by Steve Pavlina I would also triage individual assignments. If I felt an assignment was lame, pointless, or unnecessarily tedious, and if it wouldn’t have too negative an impact on my grade, I would actually decline to do it. One time I was assigned a tedious paper that represented 10% of my grade. I really didn’t want to do it, and it required a lot more hours than I felt it was worth. I was headed for an A in the class, and if I didn’t do this assignment, I’d drop to an A-. So I respectfully told the professor I was declining the assignment and that I thought it was a fair trade to receive an A- in order to reinvest those hours elsewhere. He already knew me and understood my reasons. He gave me an A-, and I was fine with that. It was indeed a fair trade. In fact, looking back I wish I’d done this sort of thing more often. |
If it helps, take some time to free-write about your performance anxiety. What's the worst thing that can happen if you don't get a particular assignment on time? What's the worst that happens if you get a bad grade on a test or in a class? Will the world come to an end? Will your mother stop loving you? Will your friends think less of you? If so, would you prefer to spend more time with people that respect you for who you are, not how you perform? Will it hurt your future job prospects or keep you from getting into the grad school you want? How likely are the negative consequences? Can you live with them?
I also have some strong perfectionist tendencies, but I am more proud of my bad grades than my good ones. That 3.2 in organic chemistry means more than the 3.95 average it brought down. Want to know why? Because sacrificing test scores for my overall well-being was a bigger challenge than nailing another 4.0.
Detach your sense of self worth from your grades.
You are not how well you perform or what you do.
Focus instead on learning for the sake of learning.