“Man, that test was so easy!” My friend says to me in between class periods. According to him, I was going to walk into the testing room in the afternoon, pen in hand and a stapled packet of paper in front of me, ready to crush the test.
The test ended up crushing me. And while this rarely happens to me, the time in freshman year when it did made me realize that different people succeed at mastering different topics, as well as struggle with other topics.
To be clear, I am not a bad student. Although I’m not a straight-A student, I try my best and give it my all on a test, even if it goes badly. I succeed on many assessments, but I, like anyone else, also have tougher assessments.
After a rough quiz, the last thing I want to hear from my peers is “it was easy,” because while it was easy for some, it was harder for others. Arguably, one of the biggest fears of high school is hearing from others that the test that you know you just blew was a test most other people succeeded on. Especially in this day and age, many people lose confidence if they feel that all their friends are succeeding in class, while they feel like they aren’t.
To avoid all of this, a simple solution is to avoid bias when talking about tests and quizzes, such as leaving out phrases like “it was a piece of cake.” Instead, maybe peers can talk about both what they did well and badly on tests and quizzes, to not only erase the guilt of not doing well but to help show that everyone is human. Maybe doing this could help people take away what they can do better from quizzes rather than being more stressed about it.
Many times I’ve been on the reverse end, where I get the feeling that my friend struggled on the test that day much more than I did. But instead of sharing how easy I thought it was (even if I did indeed think so), I usually try to cheer my classmate up or talk with them about questions they screwed up. Or, I try to cheer my friend up another way.
As a school community, we need to become more aware of how our peers feel in order to better understand one another. In a high-achieving school such as WJ, we all need to do a better job of not assuming that every Wildcat can live up to the advanced level of rigor our school is built to handle.
So the next time you get a high score on the quiz and you feel like telling your friends about it, think about how it would feel for you to be the kid who got a low score on the same assessment. Be considerate, and remember above all that everyone has their strengths and weaknesses.
