How do you keep yourself motivated in a course where you're not doing well?

[SmokeMonster]

There's this upper year 'Theory of Computation' course that I'm taking and I'm kinda struggling, I got an 82 in the first assignment and a 74 in the second, I checked the solution for the third assignment and I'll probably get somewhere in the middle for that too. I've become incredibly depressed and am losing motivation for the class. What can I do to keep myself going?

[ProgrammingFun]

I can't speak for University but I definitely can for high school. Being in IB, we are doing significantly harder math than others. My mark this year went from 98 in past years to a low of 45 overall after several tests. The time came that math went from my favourite subject to my worst fear (I actually tutored others and they got better than me on tests).
The way I motivated myself was just a determination to prove that I could do better and not disappoint those close to me. I think all that you really need is a LOT of hard work to boost your mark. This really helped me as I was able to rebound mark in supposedly some of the hardest topics (where the rest of the class dropped) from the 45 low to almost approaching 80 now.

Hope that helped in some way or another.

[crossley7]

I find that you have to set a goal for yourself in some way and spend the extra time/effort in that class. Just little goals at first like trying to get above your average on the next test and also setting a goal for midterm and writing a list of things you need to do to reach that. I'm not in university yet, but has worked fairly well in my courses in highschool and results in my mark often going up 3-4 percent between midterm and entering the exam hen it often goes up a bit again.

Finding what your specific weaknesses are and how to improve them is often the first step to getting it back together

[Tony]

How did you get to upper year classes without realizing that 70% class average is a good average? "Struggling" with 74~82? How well is the rest of the class doing? I'm in a couple of upper year courses now where the class is averaging 60%. Does your code compile and maybe even run for some (but not all) inputs? You're doing well enough.

For those of you still in high school -- your marks are probably inflated. It's a known problem in education. A ~15% drop is normal. Basically rank yourself among your peers, to see how well you are doing.

[ProgrammingFun]

Tony @ Mon Nov 07, 2011 8:32 pm wrote:

For those of you still in high school -- your marks are probably inflated. It's a known problem in education. A ~15% drop is normal. Basically rank yourself among your peers, to see how well you are doing.

LOL, when we start the IB diploma in Grade 11, they tell us that it's the largest academic jump that we'll see in our lives (from Grade 10 Ontario to Grade 11 IB). Marks in most subjects drop by 10% on average. If these are inflated, I'm getting a little depressed. (The only benefit that we see are IB conversion rates, which for some subjects are that a 75% mark converts to 97% for uni applications).

[Tony]

So it sounds like IB has their grades in order. The inflation is in regular, which is what the conversion rate is covering.

[ProgrammingFun]

Tony @ Mon Nov 07, 2011 9:14 pm wrote:

So it sounds like IB has their grades in order. The inflation is in regular, which is what the conversion rate is covering.

Thanks for that, good to know.
Are these inflated grades the reason that Universities look for 85%+ most of the time for applications?

[Tony]

Yeah, pretty much. My understanding is that Universities also try to keep track of how well admitted students perform, to try to calculate how badly each particular high school is inflating their grades (since this could depend on individual teachers and administration). In theory, if the University notices a lot of 90% students from a particular school failing, those grades are trusted less. Similarly, one might be given additional admission points for applying from a school with a good reputation.

This is why AIF is important, and one is encouraged to apply, even if the grades don't appear to be eligible -- the University might scale them enough in student's favour to put them over the admissions bar.

[Dan]

The higher you get in academia the less things become about grades and the more they become a simple pass/fail. As tony mentioned, in upper year courses anything above 70% is more then reasonable.

As for motivation, some times the only thing you can do is just bare with it intill you pass. I find the hardest part is getting started again on an assingment, project, etc when you are just starting or have stoped for some time. The only thing that works for me, is to simply force my self to start. Some times i pick an easy part or a light subtopic to start studying/reading up on. But once i get back into the grove of things it becomes easier to tackel the harder areas.

As for depression you realy have to let go a bit. 82 to 74% is realy not that bad, and realsticly no one is great at all subjects. One offten underestimated lesson of unversity is how to deal with this kind of stress and learning that you will not allways excel at everything even when you put enormous effort into it.

[mirhagk]

I hate the inflation of marks, it makes marks in courses be pretty much useless in identifying who knows their stuff and who doesn't. Once marks get above 90%, the only difference on tests is not what materials you know, but what silly mistakes you do (forgetting to write a formula, forgetting a negative sign, units, labels for graphs etc). It makes it so that someone with a doctorate in that program could do worse than some random high school kid, depending on how well they catch their mistakes.

The IB program sounds really interesting, I would really like to look at that, since I believe that 80's should really be EXCEEDING expectations, and not just knowing 80% of what they teach you.

[SmokeMonster]

The class average is in low-70s so far in this course. I think it is a relatively easy course and the assignments have been quite straightforward which is why I'm disappointed to not be doing as well in this class as I want. It feels like I just thrown away a bunch of marks which is extremely demotivating.

[Tony]

You should try to enroll yourself into a more difficult mix of courses. Have you considered Compilers, Real Time Operating Systems, and/or Japanese? Until you are skipping assignments in your "easy" courses in favour to work on assignment in courses that you would fail without making such a sacrifice... you haven't truly experienced University. 51% is a good mark, because it's a passing mark. This builds character. You have to be careful about interpreting that statement though -- slacking off to get poor marks is bad news. But no matter how smart and hard working you are, you could always dial up the difficulty for extra challenge.

[ProgrammingFun]

After University, wouldn't initial employers hire based on marks though (eg. the top students get jobs at Google)?

[Tony]

Only if you manage to get through your entire University career with no employment. Which isn't the case for top jobs.

[mirhagk]

Also if you manage to come out of university with a double major in something, or a higher degree (masters instead of bachelors), that can be a lot better than just getting honours.

In university, you are there to learn, not to be assessed. If you pass every course with a 51%, but taking the most difficult interesting things you can find, I'd say your better off then taking a bunch of easy courses and getting 90%