How do you get perfect on a test? Really need help here.

[Chillax]

No matter how much I study no matter how many times I go over things.

When the test comes I write it, feel I did well, and then I get it back and find I got some wrong.

Recently I got a test back where I got 19/20, it was just a little quiz and it what bugs me is it was PURELY memorization which means my mistake was PURE stupidity.

How do you reach perfection in this sense? I've tried so hard so many times, I don't remember getting perfect on anything since grade 10 in highschool.

It really REALLLLLLLLY drives me insane. Any insight would be greatly appreciated.

My plan is to learn to improve my concentration, I'll igmit when I took that quiz I was a bit nervous.

Seriously though **** like this just ruins my day.

[jendoe]

You know - I think the only way to get a perfect score is to do something so ridiculously easy, something you know so well you could do it in your sleep. And, in that case, it's not really worth doing - you wouldn't be learning anything new or challenging yourself.

To use Steve's game example (from the Leveling Up) article - it's like replaying level 1, over and over and over, just because you like getting a perfect score on, instead of going forward to level 2, or 10, where you know you won't get all the points, because it's harder.

I'm trying to kick the whole perfectionism thing myself because my experience has been it does NOTHING for me, except get in my way of actually trying new things. I'm finding that ditching the entire idea of perfectionism is a much better way for me to live (better = more fun, more adventures, more learning!)

Just some thoughts!!!

[Chillax]

Originally Posted by jendoe

You know - I think the only way to get a perfect score is to do something so ridiculously easy, something you know so well you could do it in your sleep. And, in that case, it's not really worth doing - you wouldn't be learning anything new or challenging yourself.

To use Steve's game example (from the Leveling Up) article - it's like replaying level 1, over and over and over, just because you like getting a perfect score on, instead of going forward to level 2, or 10, where you know you won't get all the points, because it's harder.

I'm trying to kick the whole perfectionism thing myself because my experience has been it does NOTHING for me, except get in my way of actually trying new things. I'm finding that ditching the entire idea of perfectionism is a much better way for me to live (better = more fun, more adventures, more learning!)

Just some thoughts!!!

This isn't about perfectionism, I am far from that, I couldn't care less if something is perfect but those are the marks I NEED to be getting.

Getting perfect is not easy, far from it. Anyone can study and get a high 80 or low 90, but perfect, that's an ART.

You can study all you want but when it comes down to it, you have to have a clear and calm mind so you don't have trouble recalling information.

I really think that's the key.

[Chillax]

I guess I'm the one that's making it a problem but honestly I feel deeply hurt by this and can't help but think of my self as a complete retard.

To put things in perspecrive, imagine how you'd feel if someone told you you'd get $200 for answering 2+5 correctly, and imagine you answered 8, that's exactly how I feel.

When you make a mistake that basic, it makes you question everything you know.

[pianoperformer]

Honestly, don't worry about it.

I used to be like you, except I wanted to get a 4.0, not necessarily get perfect on everything.

Believe me, in college I was a 4.0 student for the first year. Then something happened to snap me out of that: I switched majors and I was horrible at it. I got a 2.87. Imagine getting nothing below a 4.0 in college, nothing below a 3.5 in high school, and then out of the blue you have the worst three months of your life and get a 2.87.

So believe me, you could have it much worse. Count your blessings, so to speak, and don't sweat the small stuff. You should be happy to be getting 19/20 etc. It is important to realize that you will never be perfect, though it's great to strive for excellence

[RT Wolf]

Check out How to Become a Straight-A Student. Book is genius. Also check out Study Hacks. Study Hacks is the blog by the guy who wrote the book. Both are genius.

[Ajit Odedra]

Firstly, you need to realise that getting A*/100% in an exam is not about illustrating your understanding of the subject in question but rather your ability to satisfy specific criteria set by the examining board.

Focus on how your exam paper awards marks; know the syllabus and mark schemes inside out; learn about the person who sets the exams. Use past exam papers along with your course syllabus as indicators of what you need to learn. Identify and work on problematic areas - don't just wage through a textbook without purpose.

[Manomanman]

If you want to get a perfect score, you need 2 things:
1) perfect knowledge
2) perfect skills in applying that knowledge at test time

I wouldn't bother with either. Why isn't 95% just as good as 100%? There's so much inefficiency going from 95 to 100 that it's actually UNINTELLIGENT to go for perfection.

Try being perfect in the entrepreneurial world and see where it lands you...

[Chillax]

What bothers me is it feels like I've just reached a limit, a wall, no matter how hard I try or which way I go I just cannot get past it.

I've dedicated myself to school completley, I've give it 100% in the truest sense.

When you try your best and your still not good enough...what does that tell you about yourself? This is not the first time this has happened.

Do we just accept we will never be perfect? Are human beings that pathetic? I don't think so, some people can clearly do it, maybe the rest of us are just inferior.

--Note normally I'm on top of the ball with most classes but this class is heavy human anatomy and physiology which even still I wouldn't mind but the prof is the hardest in the department, he isn't hard in the unfair sense, he just makes questions that really force you to think.

I was so determined at the start of this semester, now I'm just lost and confused.

[pianoperformer]

Not good enough according to whose standards? If your own, maybe it would serve you well to lower them a little? Ask yourself what benefit you are getting trying to strive for 10% as opposed to, say, 95%? They are both A's. They will both get you a 4.0. No one will care about those 5 percentage points in the long run.

If it is other peoples' standards, then you should learn only to care about what's important to you. I know that's really tough.

Otherwise, seriously stop being so tough. You will burn yourself out and then you will do a lot worse.

[Erin Pavlina]

I had a friend who was a near straight-A student who went to medical school. They grade on a strict curve there. He would tell that there would be 10 students in a class and the teacher would walk in and say, 'Okay I'm awarding 2 A's, 2 B's, 2 C's, 2 D's, and 2 Fails. Which one will you walk away with today?" He told me that even if everyone got like a 90% and one person got an 89% that the 89 would walk away with an F. It drove him crazy. He was no longer the ace student like he was in high school and college. He nearly drove himself mad trying to be perfect.

He is now an obstetrician. He didn't graduate top in his class but he learned what he needed to learn, got his license, and the rest is history.

Don't let the pursuit of perfection drive you mad.

[RT Wolf]

I've been where you are. You may be questioning whether you're really as smart as you thought you were. Maybe you're wondering if you can achieve the goals put in front of you. Maybe you're thinking that you're not as smart as the other people around you. It's called an identity crisis.

Find someone to talk to. A close friend who's willing to just shut up and listen and not say anything is good. Your school probably has a counselling service, look them up, they're great to listen to you.

Or write about how you're feeling. The better you get this into words, the better off you'll be six months down the road.

I have limited information here, but your point seems to be that you're not as intelligent as you thought you were. Of course, that depends on your definition of intelligence. Read here:

my relationship with “intelligence” became very important, because sometimes I believed that intelligence is all you need to get good grades, and that my grades were a reflection of my intelligence and other times I believed it’s just doing the work (it’s a combination of the two). Since I was praised for my intelligence as a child (usually when I was right), I came to believe that intelligence cannot change, that if you’re smart enough, you’ll get really good grades, and I felt bad on some level that I’m not a genius like Will in Good Will Hunting. The other belief I was holding was that intelligence means being right, and that you either get a new concept or you don’t; there’s no in between, which prevented me from pushing through my confusion to learn something if I didn’t get it the first time around. I also came to see my intelligence as fixed (it can change) and that my results were solely based on my abilities, and not my effort. Here’s a quotation from the above New York Magazine that describes me perfectly in this regard:

Dweck discovered that those who think that innate intelligence is the key to success begin to discount the importance of effort. I am smart, the kids’ reasoning goes; I don’t need to put out effort. Expending effort becomes stigmatized—it’s public proof that you can’t cut it on your natural gifts.

It’s interesting to look back on my life and wonder if being told I was intelligent has affected things. One of the reasons I used to be so particular about spelling things correctly, forming proper sentences and making sure I’ve got my facts straight is because I wanted to convey the impression that I’m smart, and I had this belief that people who don’t do those things aren’t. I wonder if my interest in science was at all directed by the belief that I am intelligent and intelligent people are into science. I can see that belief causing some people to become dogmatic about science. I sometimes see this pattern in others as well, when they try to assert they’re right because, I believe, they don’t want to seem unintelligent.

Improving Self-Awareness to Achieve Your Goals | Mind-Manual

If this isn't your deal, then lemme know, I can take another crack at it. I've helped a number of students with student-related problems. You can also PM me if that's more comfortable for you.

[Chillax]

Originally Posted by RT Wolf

I've been where you are. You may be questioning whether you're really as smart as you thought you were. Maybe you're wondering if you can achieve the goals put in front of you. Maybe you're thinking that you're not as smart as the other people around you. It's called an identity crisis.

Find someone to talk to. A close friend who's willing to just shut up and listen and not say anything is good. Your school probably has a counselling service, look them up, they're great to listen to you.

Or write about how you're feeling. The better you get this into words, the better off you'll be six months down the road.

I have limited information here, but your point seems to be that you're not as intelligent as you thought you were. Of course, that depends on your definition of intelligence. Read here:


Improving Self-Awareness to Achieve Your Goals | Mind-Manual

If this isn't your deal, then lemme know, I can take another crack at it. I've helped a number of students with student-related problems. You can also PM me if that's more comfortable for you.

That's pretty much it. My motivation is myself btw, parents don't care but they do pay for it.

I know intelligence is just one part of success so I always thought even if I wasn't that smart I could make up for it with hard work.

Now I've learned hard work can only get you so far.

When you half ass something and you fail, you know you could've done better and you just shrug it off, at the very least you know how to do better next time.

However when you give something everything and still fail, it feels completley different, it makes you question everything, that's actually what drove me to this site in the first place.

In the end perhaps there really is no solution but to accept our mental incompetence, but I just can't accept that.

[jendoe]

Chillax - I'm sorry if I seemed glib.

I didn't mean that it's "easy to do something perfectly". What I meant was - if you absolutely MUST do something perfectly, you had better pick something that you already an expert at... otherwise, there are simply no guarantees. And that whatever you picked, in order for you to guarantee perfection, would be something so easy for you, it wouldn't be worth it.

For example, If I asked you to recite the alphabet in order - that's easy, right? You can do that with no real effort - you can do it absolutely perfectly I'm assuming. Maybe even drunk, or sleep-deprived, or in distress.

But, because it's something you've already mastered, there's no challenge, so what's the point.

My point was just that you can't guarantee perfection, and it's really not a useful goal. I'm not saying this to hurt you, or to make light of your obvious concerns here... (and it's coming from my experiences over the last two years.)

My experience was - the harder I tried for perfect, the less likely I was to get there. It just makes things too hard - picking an impossible goal, at least for me, makes it more difficult to actually learn or achieve anything. It focuses you on failure and "never good enough". This doesn't really support learning at all.

Anyway - I'm sorry - it seems like you're truly distressed, and I sure didn't mean to add to that. And I'm definitely not saying do not aim high or reach for lofty goals. I think those are worthy things to do, and can inspire us to achieve more. But, I think we have to do that with a fundamental respect for our humanness - and humans are not perfect

This article was helpful to me last year:
Escape from Cubicle Nation: Perfectionists are losers

Best wishes and good luck in achieving all that you set your heart to!

[RT Wolf]

Wait, you tried your best and failed? THAT'S GREAT! That's great, great, great news!

First, lemme make a distinction between performance and competence: Competence is your ability to do something and your performance is your actual action. So, competence in this case may be your intelligence, your ability to work hard to get what you want, your ability to reach your goals, your competence at life, whether you're a good person, etc. Your performance was this test and how you did on it. You've correctly identified a major cause of procrastination, which is "if I don't do my best and half-ass it, then my performance won't reflect my competence and my sense of my competence will remain intact and I don't have to go through massive self-reexamination like Chillax is right now". This is an insidious sort of procrastination, because it's not obvious. It's completely dependent on individual ability, and you have to really hit your limits to do it. That means that Rhodes scholar who's at the top institution with top grades may still be below his best ability. That's basically what Will was doing as a janitor in Good Will Hunting.

That's good news for a number of reasons: 1. Your potential isn't limited. Fine, you feel you failed today so you're questioning your competance, but that competence isn't fixed, like your intelligence isn't necessarily fixed (know what improves fluid intelligence? Video games. Excersize can also make you smarter, functionally). It grows with every failure. It's like with excersize: you are supposed to go right to the edge of your muscle's competence and fail. Then, when it grows back, it grows back stronger with a much higher competence!

Think of it this way, if I gave you a test you had trouble with from two years ago, would you be able to do much, much better? That's your competence growing. Next year, you'll be able to ace whatever you're having trouble with today. But there's no fun in just hanging around doing the stuff you already know how to do; you wanna push yourself every year and that's what school does. It pushes you to grow your competence every year.

Until and unless you are willing to fail (a lot), your competence won't grow as quickly as it can. You want to be at the Zone of Proximal Development, where you can barely do this thing.

2. Many people never, ever try their best and figure out where their limits are, they always remain shy of them and shy of not being "good enough" in one small area, cause they can't handle it. Congratulations! You're going through a massive growth period!

3. What you're talking about is your relationship to your own finite-ness. The existentialists talked about this issue. It's sortuva fact of existence and Being. I can't go into more detail about this, but if you're interested, look up the existentialists like Heidegger, Sartre, etc.

Basically, there's some facts of existence: you're going to die, you'll likely get old and feeble, you can never know everything, you're limited and finite, you can try really, really hard and still not get anywhere (story of Cain and Abel), you're likely not tall enough to play NBA, likely not big enough and good enough to play in the NFL, a billion other things, etc. How you relate to these facts of existence is important. You can either choose to Accept them and work with them, or resist them and deny them. Some links on resistence and acceptance:
Awareness and Resistance
How to bring The Peace of Non-Resistance into your life now » Personal Development - UrbanMonk.Net
The denial and the acceptance of suffering: Compassion, Part 4 » Personal Development - UrbanMonk.Net
The Power of Now is about this, too. I recommend it.

You're doing some serious denying there. You've said it yourself: "In the end perhaps there really is no solution but to accept our mental incompetence, but I just can't accept that." Well, it's not really your mental incompetence, you're likely in the top 10-20% of the world's smartest people anyway, it's all how you look at it. You can look up and say, I'm just not as smart as that guy in Good Will Hunting, or you can look down and say, "you know, I'm doin alright. I am competent enough to be a success at life according to external standards, and at my own standards, and I'm improving all the time. I'm good enough, though I'd like to be better, too". What you're accepting isn't your mental incompetence, you're just accepting how it is, where it is without judgement. It's not good or bad, it is what it is. It's like, I have a certain weight. I can say it's not good enough to be a sumo wrestler, or it's too much to be my ideal weight, but it is what it is...and I can improve!

Sorry about the long post. What you're going through isn't simple. Took me about a year to handle it, and I failed that year of school, so I hope I can help make that a bit easier. You'll still have to read all everything (multiple times), understand it and apply it in your life. Before I finish, here's a bit more from Pavlina talking about being limited and my comments on it:

Steve Pavlina recently did the same sort of thing in a recent blog entry called Fanatical About Growth. He wrote:

"The goals that interest me most are the ones that cause me to say to myself, “Wow… I’m really not sure if I’m cut out for this. This looks pretty damned tough. I’m going to have to push myself to a whole new level in order to make it to the end. I honestly don’t know if I’ll be able to pull this off.”

"But then I think to myself, “What if I fail? No big deal. At least I’ll know where my limits are. But what if I succeed? How awesome would that be? I’d gain an incredible new reference experience for the rest of my life. I’d have an amazing experience to share with others. And what new challenges might I tackle beyond this one?” That’s the kind of thinking that excites me."

I find this interesting because if I was in the same position, I’d have very different self-talk. It would be more along the lines of, “What if I can’t do it? What if I don’t measure up? What if I’m not good enough? I’m not sure I can handle that.” Notice, oddly enough, my self-talk isn’t specific, it’s universal about all of me rather than, say my level of self-discipline, and it doesn’t include anything about being able to improve things, as if failing this once means that’s the end of the game and that’s only as good as I can ever be. That’s the epitome of taking it personally. Additionally, I wanted to point out that I asked “what if I don’t measure up? What if I’m not good enough?” while Pavlina said “I’ll know where my limits are.”

Your Emotions and How You Think About Them | Mind-Manual

I hope this helps. If you'd like to know more, feel free to ask.

[Chillax]

appreciate the replies, they've really helped me sort things out

I have 2 exams coming up next week (3 actually but 2 of them are the killer ones that I can't do well in).

I definitley feel I've learned from each one of these exams, but I've been getting the following marks from these 2 classes combined (same prof).

Exam 1: A- : 1 question away from an A
Exam 2:A- : EXACT SAME score
Exam 3:A- : EXACT SAME score
Exam 4:B+ : My nervousness and self doubt caused me to change 2 answers right when I was handing the exam in, that brung my mark down from what finally would've been an A.

I'm going to take everything I've learned and put it to use, I'm going to get exercise, sleep and watch my diet, I'm also going to start meditating regularly to keep myself on track.
If I can just push myself a little bit further this time, perhaps I'll make it.

[RT Wolf]

Also wanted to add: your competence isn't the only thing that determines your performance. Sometimes it's just bad luck, sometimes it's the fact that you're imperfect, sometimes it's sheer stupidity on your part, except being stupid is garunteed to be part of your life.

Anyhoo, you might wanna take more time to sort out this stuff, it looks like you're still beating yourself up over being imperfect and not good enough. Inner peace and self-acceptance is just beyond that.