Nobody talks of education without the word “learning” and learning of course comes with its dos and don’ts. Attending school (Primary, Secondary, Polytechnics, University) will help the attendees gain knowledge and skills, and equip the students for the challenges ahead of time. But the only way to know students’ seriousness is through examination assessments.
Of course, many do fail and students’ failure is attributed to many factors which I called internal and external distractions in one of my previous articles which limit students’ chances of focusing on their academic career.
1. Poor Time Management
This has to do with the inability of a student to manage or utilize his or her time in reading, doing assignments, having research work on a project given, and studying. Poor time management is usually caused by a failure to plan and evaluate the work, projects, and assignments that you need to complete. These works, projects, assignments, and study should be based on their urgently and it’s important. Set out a to-do list and prioritize the important things to be done first before the less important, in this way you can be to plan out better and utilize time more effectively. An effect of poor time management is rushing to complete tasks. When you manage your time poorly, you may find out there’s never enough time in the day to complete everything you need to get done. As a result, you rush to finish up with whatever task you have at hand before their due time which can lead you to make mistakes and produce works, assignments, and projects that are of low quality.
2. Lack of Preparation
Preparing for an exam, test, or group work should start immediately after each lesson and topic. Being well prepared boost your confidence, you must not wait to start studying until the night before the test or exams. Cramming the night before any exams will only leave you stressed out and frustrated as you want to read everything thing at once. The brain works better when it is more coordinated on a particular thing. Knowing how to properly prepare for your tests and exams can reduce anxiety and help you get a better grade.
- Review your notes: As earlier stated, preparing for any test or exams should start immediately after lessons and topics, make out time to review your notes, draw up a scale of preference to decide which subject should be read first, write down topics that are difficult for you to understand, practice more on it as this will help you deal with fears or anxiety of not being able to answer questions from such topics in the exam, if possible seek help from classmates or teachers, then look out for topics which you easily understand, read them up, take exercises on them and evaluate yourself on it to see if you are making a progress.
- Revise topics one by one: Failure comes when you skip topics you feel you shouldn’t read or you don’t understand. Instead of skipping topics, it is easier to read on each topic extensively. Reading topics one by one will help students to get each point clearer instead of reading everything at once.
- Don’t study too late: Studying too late or a night before an examination is no study at all. The earlier you study on time, the more relaxed, focus, and confident you will be on the day of the examination.
- Give your brain a break: All work and no play makes Jack a dull student. Give yourself a break from reading, overcrowding the brain can make you lose some of the things you have studied, take everything one at a time.
- Get some exercise: Engage in exercises that can help your brain sharpened to accommodate more studying, exercises like yoga helps in recalling all you have read, been taught, and studies.
3. Procrastination
This is the act of putting things off until the last possible moment or the avoidance of a task that needs to be accomplished. Students often procrastinate because they don’t see how a project, subject, topics, assignments, and study is relevant or important to them, don’t understand the materials as in the case of a project, or just don’t know how to get started.
Procrastination can be caused by these factors;
- Lack of motivation: Students put off what they are supposed to do for another day because they lack the motivation in doing them, when one doesn’t have someone who is backing him or her, encouraging him or her, or lending a helping hand, this kills their morale in studying, reading and research work.
- Inability to start: Not knowing what to start with and where to start can make a student procrastinate his or her work.
- Size, length, and complexity of tasks: When the size and length of a work, assignment, or project work given is more than the students can handle, this will make avoid the work as its complexities are more than they can overcome.
- Fatigue: Tiredness can make a student put off work in other to sleep and recover lost strength.
- Lack of self-compassion: When a student is at ease with his or her constant failure this will reduce the student’s ability to brace up and encourage himself or herself to more study.
4. Lack of Perseverance
Perseverance is determining to keep on going in the face of setbacks and challenges. It is that inner drive that keeps in you in the game when everything else says it’s time to quit. Perseverance helps the students to attain their goal which is to make good grades and pass their examinations. To lack perseverance as a student is to fall out of place, to lose interest in why you are studying or in school, and to begin to question the efforts you have put in place which are not yet yielding positive results.
5. Low Self-Esteem
This is characterised by a lack of confidence and feeling bad about oneself. Low self-esteem can cripple a student’s performance in class, interfering with students’ ability to lead a fulfilling lifestyle. Students with low self-esteem suffer from low marks to getting failed in the examination.
Some causes of low self-esteem are:
- Negligence on the part of their parents: Parents who spend time with their children produce more dependent and strong-willed children than parents who don’t stay with their children. These parents do not give their time, support, and advice when they need be and so these students are left on their own with the feeling of not measuring up with the other students whose parents are always there for them.
- Body shapes, disabilities, and malfunctions: Students with bad body shapes, disabilities, and malfunctions such as stuttering, abnormal nervous conditions as in jerking, poor visions, and poorly arranged set of teeth all suffer from low self-esteem as their fellow students, teachers may use their conditions to ridicule them. This leaves them hopeless and frustrated and some of them may form the habit of skipping school so as not to be mocked.
- Bad company and peers: Students who move with the bad company of friends may be cajoled by their classmates when they perform poorly in tests and exams and this makes them withdrawn from people. They should be corrected and not scorned at.
6. Over-confidence
Over-confidence can cause a person to experience problems bigger than he or she thinks he can overcome. A student who is overconfident of himself or herself easily falls prey to examination failure because such a student is relying on past experience, past success, and past glory. Overconfident people are usually loud and noisy, they speak so loudly and forcefully to prove their points, they rely on past experience. To avoid this, a student should be readily available to learn, be corrected, and be guided in the course of learning and studying.
7. Lack of Interest
Showing little or no interest in one’s studies can retard a student’s growth academically, however, there are underlying causes of lack of interest in students towards their studies and these are as follows:
- Bully: Getting bullied by other kids in school on regular basis affect their self-esteem and they also lose focus from their studies and refuse to attend classes as a result of this.
- Bad teachers: Violent teachers who resort to harsh punishment also indirectly push kids away from studying. The fear of bad teachers makes them lose interest in their studies rather than concentrating more. Also, incompetent teachers who have a boring way of teaching affects the interest of the students.
- Difficult syllabus: Certain schools and colleges lay down rigid course work and extremely difficult syllabus which students are unable to cope up with. These students tend to give up on studies instead of pushing themselves more.
- Fear of assessment: Schools and colleges always squeeze in as many assessment examinations in their yearly calendar as possible. This way they hope to prepare the students better for their final exams. However, this theory doesn’t work out well as students often find it cumbersome on them and in turn make them lose interest in studying.
8. Inexperienced and Unprofessional Teachers
Teacher quality is vital to students’ academic success and achievement. A teacher who cannot deliver well will give half-knowledge of the topic to the students. The ability of a teacher to carry everyone along, take practical, correct students when they fail, keep them motivated will go a long way in seeing that these students make it in their academic endeavor. Teachers who skip difficult points in a topic or skip the whole topic because he or she finds it difficult to understand will, in turn, make the students helpless when they come across such topics in exams and tests and this will affect their chances of scoring high marks. It is expedient that schools and colleges should lookout for good and competent teachers who can weather the storm and delivery effectively with hitches to the students.
