How to Deal with Exam Failure

How to Deal with Exam Failure

Sometimes it can be very difficult to predict the outcome of your exams, whether you be in secondary school or even university. This is probably because, exams are arguably one of the most feared things in education for students. Whether a student is confident in their abilities in their chosen subject(s) or not, exams can often both predictably and unpredictably bring out the best, and more than often, the worst, in a student.

If the worst does happen, failing your exams can be one of the most devastating experiences for a student, especially when they were not expecting to fail their exams.

Coping with Failure

One way to cope with exam failure, is to talk to people. Talk to your family, talk to your friends, discuss the options you can take now that you’ve had your exam results back. One thing you must remember, is that failing your exams is not the end of the world. Exam failure is one of the many hurdles you’ll have to surpass in your life, and there are always possibilities to learn and rise above failure. After all, I’m sure most of you have heard the saying ‘failure makes you stronger’. Funnily enough, it really does. It gives you an understanding of what it means to fail, to lose, to receive a negative outcome that you may not have expected to get.

A common worry amongst students who have failed some of their exams, is that they’ll now never be able to get the job they wanted after graduating, or even the university degree they were first opting for. Wrong. You should never let exam failure force you into believing that you now can’t achieve any of your dreams. Sure, some things will be harder to reach, but that doesn’t make them unreachable. Failing exams doesn’t make you any less of a person, any less intelligent, or any less able to achieve what you want to, than those who may have gotten better results in their exams than you.

Always remember, there are many options open to you.

Your Options

One option is to retake your exams. This can either be done at college or via an online distance learning college.

This giving you another year or at least 6 months to go back over what you have learned and refine your exam practise. You can concentrate on the courses you did particularly badly at or change your subjects into something you think you might do better at.

You might decide that a qualification which offers more coursework suits you better and these are often accepted very readily by universities. Examples of these qualifications include BTECs and Level 3 Diplomas. Subjects can often be more vocational and can be aimed well at the world of work as well as the academic subjects traditionally taken for university entrance. Assignment based courses enable you to make correction to your work and resubmit corrections, which takes the pressure off unlike having to sit exams.

The most important thing to remember in such a situation is to remain true to yourself; remember who you are, what your strengths are, what you are capable of doing, and what you want to do, and you will get there.