what's your worst test grade ever?

I once had a dream to be an actuary.

They use their mathematical superpowers to analyze businesses' financial costs of risk and uncertainty. Actuaries make good money. Job satisfaction is high. I was on track for a lucrative career.

Then I took an actuarial science class in college.

I no longer wanted to be an actuary.

The type of math and statistics involved in the class didn’t excite me. And with actuary careers, you’d spend your whole life studying for exams to get promotions and pay raises. I didn’t want to be studying for exams my entire life. That’s stuff meant for college.

I still took the class (financial mathematics). Even though I wouldn’t use what I learned in an actuary career, what I learned still mattered.

I didn’t do well in my first year of college. I breezed through high school without studying a lot. So when transitioning to college, I assumed I could get by with the same minimal effort.

My GPA was below 3.0. I struggled in the “easy” electives. No shortcuts worked.

When I returned to Binghatmton for my second year, I chose to take the best shortcut out there…

Studying.

My grades improved, and my passion for math reached an all-time high. During that fall, I took the financial mathematics class.

A few weeks into the semester, we had our first exam. The new, studious me spent hours in the preceding weeks going through hundreds of practice problems and memorizing formulas.

Yet, nothing on the exam seemed to match what we had done in class. None of the questions had the same format as the practice problems. I felt like I was reading a foreign language. I had no more hope or confidence.

I knew I had failed. I couldn’t answer any questions entirely. I left a few answers blank.

After deciding to work harder and try to excel, this first exam killed me. All that studying just to do worse than I did the previous year.

A week later, the professor posted the grades online. I was ready for 70% or 60% to pop up as my grade. When I looked at the online portal, my exam grade was worse than I expected.

That little number next to “Exam 1” said 34%.

Never in my life had I ever received a grade lower than that. In my entire schooling career, this still stands as my lowest raw score ever.

I felt terrible. A score that low would set me back. Even if I received perfect scores on the final two exams, getting more than a C in the class would be tough.

Then my professor emailed the class.

He sent a strange excel file, so I opened it up. The file contained a table showing the average class grade for the exam.

The lowest score was 4%.

And the average…

Was around 28%.

In some miraculous way, I did better than half the class. And that’s with a 34/100.

My 34% translated into a B+. From an F to a B+. Not too bad.

Thanks to the curve, I eventually passed the class with a B+, without ever receiving a raw exam score above 70%.

This was the first class I ever took that utilized a standardized curve for grading. All my math classes after this one followed the same format.

So, despite having a sub-3.0 GPA in my first year, I graduated with a 3.4 GPA two years later.

It wasn’t easy to get perfect scores on the math exams, but I never had to do that.

To succeed in the program, you didn’t have to be an innate math genius that solved problems as fast as a calculator. All that mattered was outperforming everyone else on the curve.

Even though my test exam was 34%, it didn’t represent failure like it usually would. It meant that I understood more than the average student. And sometimes, in life, it doesn’t matter whether you do something perfectly. You just have to outperform everyone else.

It’s not about scoring that 100%. You just need that 34% while everyone else gets the 28%.