The GPA Trap

Exeter is a melting pot of smart people with great qualities, but no person or life is perfect. With ambitious aspirations and refined talents come imperfections and struggles. They are all different and we don’t have to understand them all, but to write them off altogether is probably the coldest thing you can do in a place as demanding, rigorous, and high-pressure as Exeter.She sat on my couch, confidence spewing from a cool, quick voice. “Anyone who gets below a 9.6 isn’t trying.” She has an idea of my grades. I lay face down on my pillow, head towards the wall, unable to say a word. I couldn’t look at her. I knew what she was saying wasn’t true. It couldn’t be. Had I not been trying my entire prep year? Lower fall barely made the cut. In that moment, I was already emotionally vulnerable, and my mind wasn't even trying to process what that number actually meant. I didn’t say a thing because even an “mhm” would have triggered a flood from my eyes– tears that wouldn’t rush out because of a year of less-than-average grades, but because, as I was now being told, I didn’t try for them. She mistook my absolute silence for a green light to continue: that she has a fabulous shot at a Negley next fall since a recent winner promised to edit her 333 in the spring; that she is destined for early cum laude, a GPA value numerically impossible for me; that her family wants her at Yale, but she aspires to find herself at [other Ivy League School].Eventually: “Oh, are you okay?” she asked. I didn’t say anything because I couldn’t move my face nor could I think of any other words besides, “Of course I’m not okay.”You might think that average is great. You might think it’s terrible. It may, at first hand, sound like I’m just jealous and bitter. And maybe that’s partially true, but it’s not the entire story. Exonians have an awful habit of jumping to conclusions about people. With academic lives and social lives interweaved to compose our everyday, 24/7 existence, it feels like there’s no escape.I began my time here like the average prep—excited like no other. I was going to “Egg-zeter,” a school my home friends knew because their high school tried to emulate my school’s discussion method and math curriculum; a school that, even in a state where boarding school is mostly a Hollywood-movie-thing, some people recognized and asked me about when I proudly wore my deep maroon hoodie.But Exeter hit me hard. My disastrous prep fall was a complete slap in the face. I came from an extremely small private school where I’d spend English and history classes furiously waving my hand in the air, competing so my teachers could ask me to complete their factual fill-in-the-blank statements. Being called on to regurgitate the answer was supposed to bring delight and satisfaction. You can imagine that Exeter English and history overwhelmed me and, for some other awful reason, physics utterly crushed me. Some people say that prep fall was the easiest time for them, while others join me in saying that it reminded us we had been brought to the big leagues. When I listed my prep fall teachers to some dorm mates the other day, they said, “Wow, you had tough teachers for a first term.” On one hand, you could say that I did indeed have hard teachers. But on the other hand, I hadn’t just gotten a 9.4 that term. I got several .2s below that.I score pretty high on standardized tests, sans studying, and while that’s not indicative of your intellectual worth, it has to count for something. I’m not one of those people who are known for that one passion of theirs, and people have told me that I come across as “smart” or “academically focused.” In other words, while my grades have surely gone up, my baseline intelligence hasn’t. This change was from something else—a change that required me to be more confident, to suck it up when people don’t agree, to go way beyond my suffocating, narrow comfort zone, to pinpoint my most trustworthy role models on campus, and to not let such cynical comments affect me.There are those Exonians who have been flying high academically since they first stepped foot on campus. Entering such a competitive school while still consistently maintaining such high marks in class is, to many others and me, amazing, mind-boggling, and impressive. It truly is, and I fully respect and applaud every one of those people. At the same time, looking for the will to get back up after a serious academic wakeup call might be consuming, defeating, exhausting, frustrating, and heavily emotional—but it is a sign that the Exeter experience wasn’t just another four years of life–that it was used to its full advantage as an irreplaceable, life-altering journey of its own.When I think back to the days of prep fall, much of prep winter, and parts of prep spring, I recall a meek girl who barely spoke a couple words in class over the course of the entire term. If you saw me in class today, you’d likely never guess I was the same person. Some, like the bulldog-in-training I mentioned before, may consider those parts of my academic career here as a huge blemish, permanently staining my transcript. While I do look at the pure numeric values as a mild disappointment, I remain thankful for the chance to rework and be inspired by them.Everyone at Exeter is fighting their own odds, and at a time when grades will become part of life for preps and when uppers and seniors will continue to treat grades as life itself, we have to remember the big picture. The overwhelming majority of Exonians all have pressures to succeed. I genuinely believe that you can’t go through this place without multiple epiphanies and realizations. They usually hurt, but if you look hard enough, you’ll find some motivation in them. All of us face difficulties, but I especially commend those Exonians who fight against the odds—be it in terms of your grades, in terms of your athletic season, or of any other cause– and continue to work themselves back up. This is a real struggle for more than just one person, but what sucks even more is that you can’t really bring this topic up without being judged or given some weird looks. This is a terrible stigma that is eating away at the student body.Grades are certainly important to an extent. They do gauge your performance in a specific setting given specific materials. At Exeter, we don’t usually spit back facts. We do have to think: but that’s exactly where we go wrong– we assume that just because we’re developing our answers instead of regurgitating them, we’re somehow enlightened. I lament that we still hunt ferociously for the grades, although I know it’s hard not to. We nod when we hear “learn for the sake of learning” and “be caring of others,” but it’s too easy to get lost in your personal spell and twice as difficult to get yourself out of it.“It’s just a number,” some say. I’m not sure what it really means yet, and I know I still have a long, hectic, and grueling year and two terms to go. A number out of 11, however, cannot compete with Exeter’s countless opportunities for me to realize, reflect, and improve. Whatever that value may be in the end, like all other things, there is a story to mine, and the same goes for everyone else, too.