What To Do To Recover From a Bad Grade

It’s December, which means semester 1 is rapidly coming to a close. And, if you have a few grades that aren’t looking great, now is the time to bring them up. You can do a lot with 3 weeks, as long as you know what you’re trying to achieve and what you can do to bring your grade up.

Play around with assignments

First, you want to figure out a baseline. You can do this by seeing where you are now and what grades you need to reach your goal. Certain websites and apps (like Grade Calculator or Bessy) allow you to input possible assignment grades and see what will help you obtain the overall class grades you want. That way, you know exactly what you need to get on assignments instead of hoping for the best.

Understand grading categories

Funny enough, we’ve already done a Blog post on this very topic—how convenient! But, in essence, every grade isn’t weighted the same, and your overall class grades is a combination of different assignment and category weights. What this means is that if you aren’t doing particularly well on quizzes, then a few 100s on homework assignments isn’t going to bring your grade up. Doing better on quizzes, on the other hand, will. Make sure your goal is feasible and that the weighted grade categories won’t prevent you from getting your desired grade.

Practice more

We know it’s cliché, but it’s true. Practice makes progress, and the best way to achieve mastery of a skill is to practice it over and over again. This can be through rereading notes, reteaching the topics to someone else, taking practice tests, or doing any number of other study tools. This practice will also carry over into the next assessment, because you’ll be more confident, which makes you less likely to have silly mistakes.

Ask for help

Your teachers are there to help you, so take advantage of it. Most (if not all) have some form of extra help or office hours, and that is the best place you can go if you need some help. Oftentimes, the teacher will recognize that you are trying and meet you halfway, which can end in extra practice, a redo on an assignment, or even some extra credit. It’s all about using your resources.

The sad thing is, bad grades are bound to happen. But, it’s not the end of the world. The good thing about the end of the quarter or semester is that there are probably a lot more grades going into the gradebook, which means a lot more opportunities for you to bring your course grade up. Using these tricks, you’ll see positive change and be able to get that desired grade. And, if you liked this, be sure to check out our other posts below or in the Blog page.