How do you get over a bad grade (F)?

Get a good grade (A).

Story: I had a 4.0 GPA for a long time, and I was totally neurotic about it. I lived on coffee and no sleep, studying to keep that average where it was. I obsessed over it. No kidding…the stress was ridiculous. Then I failed a microbiology exam. OMG, my world had ended! I was nearly suicidal over it.

Thankfully a wonderful professor noticed my distress and talked to me about it. She reminded me that when you buy a brand-new car, you agonize over getting that shiny beautiful paint job scratched for the first time. When it inevitably happens, you feel awful, but then you get over it and relax a little, and owning the car becomes more pleasant. My GPA was like that car, she said. I’d gotten my first scratch, it was still a nice “car”, so now I could relax and get on with my studies.

It made sense to me. That first “scratch”, enabled me to stop obsessing, and get more out of my college experience. I brought my grade back up, and while my 4.0 was out the window, I graduated with an excellent GPA.

You will, too. Relax.

There is not much you can do other than improving it. Promise yourself you will do better next time, study harder and put all the fun aside for a while that you don’t need, until that grade goes up. If its a quiz grade or some kind of test, you can also ask that teacher it you can re-take it, and study to see if you can do better this time?

Stop beating yourself up over it, the amount of times that I failed in my studies - the first six months of my honours I didn’t pass a single important test (I’m not lying), yet I still passed my year. Just focus on improving, take that test or assignment and go through it, try and understand what it was that you aren’t getting and go speak with your lecturers about it. That way they can see you want to be helped and am serious about passing and will help you in which way they can.

You don’t say if you are a high school or college student. If you are in high school than your GPA will take a hit and if you need the class to graduate it could make you go to Summer School. If it is in college can’t you retake the class to raise the grade? Either case my best advice is to remember that you can not change the past, you can only learn from it. 10 years from now neither you nor anyone else will care what grade you got; in the end grades are the least important part of education.

improve it