Our marks matter: Why students pretend not to care about university grades

Being disappointed by a grade at university is a rite of passage. It’s something that everyone experiences at whatever level you are working towards at one point or another in your academic career. So why do so many of us pretend that we don’t care about our grades? We pay a lot of money every year for this education, so why do so many people pretend that it doesn’t matter to them?

Granted, some people genuinely don’t care – to be honest, sometimes I envy them. How nice it must be not to be completely overwhelmed by the prospect of having to be an academic weapon, day in, day out! But, for the most part, we are here because we pay for the privilege of having a higher education. We want to be here, to educate ourselves on subjects that interest us, from physics to French, marketing to maths, we are here for what it can give us.

There are also those who get incredible grades but act like they don’t care about them. Why the need to play it cool? Be proud of what you’ve achieved. Celebrate the fact that your hard work paid off. Getting a top grade at university isn’t easy; it takes effort, and you’ve earned it.

However, please, don’t make a show of it. No one wants to hear how “easy” the exam was for you. It’s important to acknowledge your achievement without putting others down.

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We often hide our disappointment when we get a grade we’re unhappy with. Sometimes we pretend we didn’t work that hard on it anyway, or that it was a silly exam, it wasn’t marked properly, the question was worded weirdly, the list goes on. Maybe we tell those around us it didn’t matter, it was only 25 per cent of that module, such a small part of the year, and means nothing in the grand scheme of things. When actually, sometimes it does matter.

Sometimes you do work hard on a piece of work, and it doesn’t go the way you want it to, and it becomes a big deal. Other times,  you may just have high expectations for yourself. Whatever it may be, feelings vary, from caring about our grades or pretending we don’t to avoid showing disappointment.

University students in general tend to have a habit of brushing things like this off, so that we don’t show that we really did work hard and didn’t achieve what we wanted to. It can stem from embarrassment, the thought that you were better than that. The scary possibility that you might have to tell someone else what you got, and then they will also know that you didn’t do very well.

Sometimes university is just completely terrifying, and you don’t want to feel as though you’re letting yourself down. You’ve got the biggest opportunity to do yourself justice, so when you slip up, it’s frightening. You feel like you’re losing track of yourself, and it’s so easy to spiral and panic about it.

This is probably the first time in your life that you have this much control over your work. With this newfound control, we often also get an immense amount of pressure. No teacher is chasing you for deadlines, no parent reminding you to revise, nothing to fall back on. When things don’t go to plan, if you miss a deadline, or fail an assessment, or just don’t do as well as you hoped, it’s so easy to internalise these and start to question your abilities, and decide to switch it up to an apathetic view of it – you can’t be disappointed if you just don’t care, right?

It is so easy to compare yourself to other people at university, as for our entire academic lives leading up to this point, we have been graded on a curve, pitted against our peers, our friends, our classmates, competing for the top spot. But once we get to uni, suddenly we’re not competing with everyone else, but with ourselves. Suddenly, you’ve gone from being the top in the class to being put together with hundreds of academic overachievers who were the tops of their classes in school, and you get graded based on your own merit. That is terrifying, and it means that so many of us struggle with not feeling good enough.

It’s not just about being better than everyone else, but it’s about proving that you deserve to be here, that you’re capable of doing it. This shift can be incredibly overwhelming, and the outcomes can be varied: for some, it feeds into a spark of energy to excel, while for others, it sparks impostor syndrome. The haunting feeling that everyone else is better than you, they’re more talented, more prepared, or more deserving. The irony is that even though almost everyone feels this way, no one really talks about it. We sit in this silent struggle and end up feeling totally isolated, when it’s actually a universal experience.

Obviously, the university experience isn’t just about your grades. It’s also about living your life independently, meeting new people, moving away from home, building your own education and gaining some new life experiences. This means that sometimes, grades aren’t top priorities, and people are choosing to focus more on life experience and making the most of their life at university than university being their life. Some people might want to gain different things from university than you do, and sometimes they just don’t care about grades in the same way you do.

That doesn’t make their approach any less valid. There’s no one-size-fits-all formula for how to go about it. For some of us, it’s about academics and aiming for the top marks, for others, it’s about gaining some life experience, building connections, or actually just figuring out who they are and what they want from life. It’s important to remember that everyone is on their own path, and just because someone’s priorities differ from yours doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong. In fact, accepting this might help you to have a better understanding of what really matters in life, past the blackboard home page.

University is such an individual experience; you can’t compare yours to someone else’s, and I can almost guarantee that it won’t be linear. You will have ups and downs – sometimes more downs than ups – but that’s okay, because it’s all for you. You chose to do this, you wanted to do this, so it’s time to show some pride in your work. Be proud of the work you have created, because it was the best you could do at the time, and that is all you can ask of yourself.

Let yourself care about your grades, you’ve worked hard for them. You’re allowed to be disappointed as much as when you’re happy with them.