Learning to embrace the stepping stones

There’s a specific kind of silence that follows opening a midterm grade you weren’t ready for. It’s not just disappointment; it’s heavier than that. It settles somewhere between your chest and your stomach, lingering longer than it should. When I opened mine and saw 29 per cent, it didn’t feel like I had just failed a test. 

It felt like I had failed as a person. 

That reaction might sound dramatic, but if you’ve ever stared at a grade far below your expectations, you probably understand exactly what I mean. 

Midterms, especially in university, have a way of turning academic performance into something deeply personal. They’re not just assessments of what you know; they begin to feel like assessments of who you are, like your work ethic, your intelligence, your discipline and your worth. When the result is bad, it doesn’t just sting academically; it feels like a moral failure. 

However, that interpretation is flawed and, more importantly, it’s harmful. 

Somewhere along the way, whether it’s from years of school, societal pressure or our own expectations, we start to equate success with goodness. If you do well, you’re “on track”, “responsible”, “capable”. If you don’t, the narrative flips. 

A bad midterm grade becomes evidence in a case we didn’t even realize we were building against ourselves. 

However, a test is not a moral document. It does not measure your character. It does not account for context, setbacks or circumstances. It simply captures performance at a single point in time. 

Yet, when I saw that 29 per cent, my first instinct wasn’t curiosity or analysis, it was guilt. 

What that number didn’t show was the three weeks I had missed leading up to the midterm. 

A dental issue had taken me out of classes entirely; not just physically, but mentally too, with pain, appointments, recovery and the general disruption that comes with emergencies. Three weeks might not sound like much, but in a university course, it’s a huge gap. That’s lectures missed, concepts skipped, practice problems never attempted. 

Catching up isn’t as simple as “just reading the slides.” It’s typing to piece together a moving train while it’s already left the station.

Still, when the grade came back, none of that felt like it mattered. I didn’t think, “This makes sense given what happened.” I thought, “I should have done better.”

That’s the trap. 

One of the hardest things to accept in university is that effort does not always equal results, at least not immediately. 

You can try. You can care. You can intend to succeed, and still fall short. That disconnect is where a lot of the emotional weight comes from. Because if you believe that effort should guarantee success, then failure must mean you didn’t try hard enough. 

However,  that’s not always true. 

Sometimes you’re missing foundational knowledge. Sometimes life interrupts in ways you can’t control. Sometimes you’re learning how to learn in an entirely new environment. 

Sometimes, like in my case, you’re recovering from something that pulled you out of the course for weeks, and you’re doing your best to catch up while everything keeps moving forward. 

The real issue isn’t the grade itself; it’s how quickly we attach it to our identity. “I got 29 per cent” becomes “I am a 29 per cent student.” It’s subtle, but powerful. Once that shift happens, every future assignment starts to feel like confirmation. You begin to expect failure, brace for it and sometimes even unconsciously reinforce it. 

However,  grades are snapshots, not definitions. 

A single midterm doesn’t represent your intelligence, your potential or your future. It represents a moment, a specific intersection of preparation, understanding, timing and circumstance. Nothing more. 

What if, instead of treating midterms like verdicts, we treated them like feedback?

That 29 per cent, as painful as it was, tells a story. Not about failure, but about gaps. It points to what I didn’t understand, what I missed and where I need to focus moving forward. It’s not a judgment, it’s data. 

Data, unlike judgment, is useful. This doesn’t mean pretending the grade doesn’t matter. It does. However  its value isn’t in defining you, it’s in guiding you. 

We talk a lot about “learning from failure,” but in practice, it’s uncomfortable. No one enjoys being in the middle of it. Still, growth rarely happens in moments of easy success. It happens in the messy middle, when things don’t go as planned, and you’re forced to reassess. 

That midterm? It’s a stepping stone. 

Not in a cliche, motivational poster way, but in a real, practical sense. It’s the point where you stop assuming you understand everything and start engaging more intentionally. For me, this means going back and filling in the gaps from those missed weeks. Asking questions I might have avoided before and changing how I study, not just how much. 

I feel the most important thing for me to do is accept that catching up takes time, and that’s okay. It also means giving myself a bit of grace. 

One of the most important shifts is learning to separate self-worth from academic performance. You can be hardworking and still struggle, you can care deeply and still fall behind. You can be capable and still have bad results. None of those things are contradictions. 

That 29 per cent doesn’t erase the effort I’ve put into other areas. It doesn’t cancel out my goals, my values or my determination to keep going. If anything, it highlights something important: resilience isn’t about avoiding failure, it’s about continuing despite it. 

The hardest part after a bad midterm isn’t the grade itself, it’s what comes after. 

Do you shut down? Do you spiral? Or do you keep going?

Carrying the weight of “moral failure” makes it almost impossible to move forward productively. It turns every study session into punishment instead of progress. However,  when you reframe it as feedback or a stepping stone, it becomes lighter. Not easy, but manageable. 

You start asking better questions, like what exactly did I not understand? How can I approach this differently next time? What support do I need? Then slowly, the focus shifts from what went wrong to what comes next. 

In the grand scheme of things, one midterm (even a really bad one) is a small moment. It doesn’t define your degree, or your career, and it definitely doesn’t define you. 

What matters more is how you respond to it. 

Do you let it reinforce the idea that you’re not capable? Or do you use it as proof that you’re still learning, and that learning isn’t always linear? 

That’s because it isn’t. 

That 29 per cent still stings. It probably will for a while. However, it’s no longer a symbol of failure; it’s a starting point. A reminder that life happens, that setbacks are real, and that progress doesn’t always look the way we’d expect it to. 

Midterms can feel like moral failures because we’ve been taught to see them that way. However,  they are not. They are checkpoints, not conclusions. Sometimes, the most important steps forward start with the moments that feel like the biggest setbacks. 

So if you’re sitting with a grade that feels heavier than it should, take a breath. 

It’s not the end of your story, it’s just part of it.