School Grades Don't Define Your Self-Worth

Your grades can often feel like the most important thing in the world. Lots of students believe that the grades they achieve at ages 14, 15, and 16… define their intelligence, abilities, and their worth as a person.  

I'm not going to tell you that grades hold absolutely no importance, but school grades fail to take into consideration various aspects of your abilities. Every person in this world possesses unique talents and skills that cannot and should not be assessed through standardized testing. 

As a burnt-out gifted kid myself, I understand the desire for academic validation, the need to be told you’re doing something well, you’re doing something right, you’re good. However, fixating on achieving high grades was more stressful than working towards those grades. The pursuit of perfection was filled with stress, anxiety, and frustration directed at me for not being able to listen and pay attention to subjects that I had no interest in and no need for, 6 hours a day, 5 days a week. 

School always came easy to me, I never enjoyed school, but I never had to try, work hard, or revise and yet I was constantly being told how “bright” I was.  So that’s how I viewed myself: smart and with “great potential”.  But school got harder, and I couldn’t just turn up to an exam and expect to do well without revising. My grades slipped and so did my opinion of myself: if I wasn’t smart, what was I?  So, I stopped trying. I didn’t listen in classes, I got in trouble all the time and I was always in detention. I gave up completely. 

Due to COVID and mental health issues, I pretty much stopped going to school for 3 years. I decided that if I couldn’t get perfect grades then there was no point in trying. Ultimately, I decided to sit my GCSEs (final exams at age 16 in the UK that you have to pass to leave school) and I did okay. That word “okay” was something I was so scared of for so long. I couldn’t bear the idea that I was just “okay” and that I was no longer “bright” and “gifted”, and that was because I thought my grades defined my worth as a person, not how I treated my friends, not my plans for my future, not my ability to understand how people are feeling, not my desire to help others, but a number on a piece of paper. 

I am here to tell you that doing “okay” at school is not what defines you!!! I can almost guarantee that when someone asks one of your friends about you, the last thing they do is start recalling the time you wrote a great essay on Shakespeare or how quickly you can solve algebraic equations. Kindness, empathy, integrity, determination, and loyalty: are just a few attributes that cannot simply be measured by a grade and yet hold vital importance to how people view you as a person.

Now as a college student, I can say that success extends beyond academic achievements. My classes are full of people who performed much better, and much worse in school than me, and yet we are all sat in the same room, with the same teachers, learning the same things.

When I saw my success as a result of my grades, I had my heart set on becoming a lawyer. Why? Because people told me I was smart and therefore I would make a great lawyer, and I listened, I romanticized the idea of years of university to do a job just because I was smart. Limiting success to what you’ve been told you can achieve academically, traps you with a narrow definition of achievement. Now I am happily sitting here, writing this and pursuing my dream of becoming a journalist (and I am so much happier). 

Even better, I enjoy learning for learning's sake. The things I learn are interesting and now my focus isn’t solely on grades.

School grades should not and do not define your self-worth, whether you see that yet or not. It’s not easy, but by accepting the fact that grades are just one of the many, many factors that contribute to your achievement, you can learn to have a deeper appreciation for all the things about yourself that you don’t take notice of (but others do), whether that’s how kind, funny, empathetic, supportive, outgoing, caring…Whatever it is that makes the people surrounding you, want to surround you.

Lots of Love, Jems <3