Through out my grade school years, I’ve never once really had to try very hard to do well in my classes. Whether it be english, math, or science, everything just made sense to me, and I never really had to try hard in any of these classes. If I had an exam, I’d just sit down, cruise through my notes for about 30 minutes the day prior, take my exam and get an guaranteed B+ at worst. I don’t want to make this seem like I’m bragging, but it lays down a background to where I’m coming from.
This changed when I took my AP Bio class. All the AP sciences were notorious for being very difficult. However, me being me, and having passed my general bio class with flying colors, didn’t expect the class to be very difficult at all. Boy, was I wrong. On the day before my first exam in that class, I did my usual routine of briefly skimming through my notes for a few minutes and got ready to sleep. On the day of the exam, I remember feeling good, and when I got the exam, my mind went blank. None of the materials I had studied for stuck in my head and all the questions were so much more detailed than I had expected. I’ve never finished an exam feeling this terribly before. When I got my results back, I was taken aback by the low exam score, even though I knew I had done very poorly on the exam.
I felt terrible but I thought maybe this exam was an exception, and I repeated the same thing for my next exam. As expected, I did poorly on this exam as well. I kept up the same thing up until the after the midterm. My overall average in the class was probably around the 60s, and it was then I finally realized that if I kept this up, I might fail the class and not receive credit. Starting then, my attitude in the class changed completely and I began to act like a proper student, studying nightly and slowly but steadily building up my knowledge in that class. I remember the night before my next exam, I actually felt prepared and didn’t have a feeling of impending doom from failure.
I took my exam the next day, and actually felt good after finishing the exam. When I received my grade and saw that I had passed with flying colors, I was so relieved. I remember feeling very proud of myself actually. This was the turning point of changing my studying habits. I kept up my efforts in the class and ended up doing well on my subsequent exams as well as passing the AP exam with a 4!
