Getting good results feels amazing, and there is no better feeling of reward for all those hours revising. However, for some students, results day can be a huge disappointment. Some students, despite revising will not have got the results they hoped for, and while friends are celebrating, the feelings that go with this can be pretty devastating. Here are my top tips from almost three decades of teaching experience.
Dr Sharon George, Senior Tutor
It has been my experience that no student is immune to a disappointing result, no matter how stellar their academic performance has been to date. In fact, the best students are often the ones who can be most likely to underestimate the amount of work needed to prepare for an assessment. So far they have found studying relatively easy so why should this be any different? It is these brighter students, that take failure the hardest and if not supported, can get de-railed by knocking the enthusiasm out of a subject for the student, or adding anxiety to an already stressful course. Handled properly, this failure can also be the best thing that could have happened to them, waking them up and motivating them to try harder, and perform better.
Five top tips for improving after a bad result
Don’t dwell on a bad mark
All students at some point have a mark that they are not proud of. You studied, you were assessed, it didn’t work out. You need to dust yourself off, move on, and do something about it. A mark is just a form of feedback, information that you can use to improve. There is nothing you can do to change the past, but you can affect how you perform next time. This mark is a sign that you need to do something differently, and you need to work out what that is… which brings me to number 2.
Invite negative feedback
This sounds obvious, but we are all prone to fishing for complements, but success is a poor teacher. If we are never criticised, how will we ever improve? We should be fishing for constructive criticism including negative comments. This doesn’t mean asking “where did I go wrong?”. Examiners don’t mark you down, they award marks for things you do. So instead, ask “how can I improve?”. Get precise detailed feedback wherever you can. It’s not always easy giving criticism, especially to a high performing motivated student, so don’t forget to thank the person giving you feedback.
Act on your feedback
Let’s assume you have your feedback, you need to look at how you put that into practice. It may be that in an exam you are not approaching the questions in the right way, or you have a tendency to leave out detail, or that you are revising the wrong areas. Having study support can help with this.
Deal with the stress
Our stress hormones have served our ancestors well, to help us run away from, or fight threats. In a modern context we are not allowed to flee from the exam room, or fight our examiners… imagine the chaos. We still have those hormones. They are physical chemicals that will interfere with your performance, sleep and health. You need to break them down. Relaxation is one way, but if you are too stressed for that, you need to simulate the fight or flight response and do some exercise. It will clear your build-up of cortisol, and help you focus. Joining a class may help give you some much needed social stimulation too.
Access support
It is also my experience that most students who have some sort of academic mentor don’t use them in the way that they could. I recall sitting for hours in my academic tutor drop-in, all by myself waiting for students to come and talk to me. Those that did would come with all sorts of issues, that maybe were not obviously affecting their study, but talking about things like being homesick, or struggling to find a career path were things I could be a sounding board for. If you have a mentor or tutor with an open surgery, not only will you be alleviating their loneliness by going to see them, your performance will benefit and you will be saving them time later down the line if you fix issues with them earlier.
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