The modern world makes everyone compete against each other because that distracts them from the people posing the real problems. The same idea is true in university, although the problems here are literal problems on exam papers instead of structural inequality. Which is good, for you, because exam problems are much easier to solve!
Comparing yourself to other students isn’t just easy, it’s outright seductive. You see someone who seems to breeze through exams, surf over problem sets, and hand up 100s every time they take a test, and it’s easy to offload all your own problems onto your imagination of them. You fantasize that they find it easy. Even though you don’t know how much work they might have done behind the scenes. Worse, you might decide that there’s no point in pushing yourself when other people can already do things so effortlessly.
The other extreme is people not doing as well as you, the ones struggling on every assignment, and obviously having a hard time even keeping up with the course. There’s an awful temptation to think yourself safe because you’re doing better than them. But unless you’re studying Battle Royale knowing where weaker students work isn’t going to make things any easier for you. And when you qualify and arrive in the real world, “I was fine, I did better than that other person” isn’t going to impress anyone.
You didn’t come to college to track other people. You came to college to improve yourself. Your university isn’t running the Hunger Games and you don’t need to defeat other students to win. All you need is to know is more than you knew before. The only person you need to beat is your past self. Which you already know you can do, or you’d never come to class at all.
If society truly measured everyone against each other we wouldn’t have universities. We’d have Olympic-level trials about age 10 and then the winners would get one-on-one training so intense they’d quickly decide they really hadn’t won at all. When you sit down to study it’s time to forget everyone else. It doesn’t matter how well somebody else did on the last test, or how easy (they claimed) it was for them. It doesn’t even really matter which parts of the course the professor talked about this week. All that matters is which parts of the course you find difficult. Which parts of yourself you can improve. The study is for YOU. The tests are just a way of telling you how it’s going.
“I’m better than some other people” is a terrible resume.
Comparing yourself to other students isn’t just easy, it’s outright seductive. You see someone who seems to breeze through exams, surf over problem sets, and hand up 100s every time they take a test, and it’s easy to offload all your own problems onto your imagination of them. You fantasize that they find it easy. Even though you don’t know how much work they might have done behind the scenes. Worse, you might decide that there’s no point in pushing yourself when other people can already do things so effortlessly.
The other extreme is people not doing as well as you, the ones struggling on every assignment, and obviously having a hard time even keeping up with the course. There’s an awful temptation to think yourself safe because you’re doing better than them. But unless you’re studying Battle Royale knowing where weaker students work isn’t going to make things any easier for you. And when you qualify and arrive in the real world, “I was fine, I did better than that other person” isn’t going to impress anyone.
You didn’t come to college to track other people. You came to college to improve yourself. Your university isn’t running the Hunger Games and you don’t need to defeat other students to win. All you need is to know is more than you knew before. The only person you need to beat is your past self. Which you already know you can do, or you’d never come to class at all.
If society truly measured everyone against each other we wouldn’t have universities. We’d have Olympic-level trials about age 10 and then the winners would get one-on-one training so intense they’d quickly decide they really hadn’t won at all. When you sit down to study it’s time to forget everyone else. It doesn’t matter how well somebody else did on the last test, or how easy (they claimed) it was for them. It doesn’t even really matter which parts of the course the professor talked about this week. All that matters is which parts of the course you find difficult. Which parts of yourself you can improve. The study is for YOU. The tests are just a way of telling you how it’s going.
