Carelessness

What do you think of when you heard the word, “unflattering?” Perhaps it is a certain object, perhaps a certain action, or even another person. In everyone’s lives, there are unflattering moments. It might be rare, or such moments may take place everyday. As an average person, I have had my share of unflattering moments. One such moment took place a couple of years ago.

In elementary and middle schools, all students are required to take standardized tests. Such tests are designed to test students to see how much they have been learning over the years. Often times, there are no grades given, just a chart showing the percentage of test takers who’s scores you exceeded. I and my studious self often times would be in the top 90-99%, yet in third grade, this was most especially not true of my math skills. I had scored reasonably well on all of the other sections of the test, falling within the 90-99% range. Yet, in math, I only scored higher than 27% of the test takers. Considering that the year past math was my highest subject, this was shocking. It was something that I, as well as everyone else, was most certainly not used to.

In the following days, everyone was sharing and comparing their scores on the differing sections, which was forbidden. Even still, everyone did it, mostly to see how they compare to the brighter individuals. When I was asked my scores on my standardized tests, I willingly shared them. Yet, in third grade, I tried to ignore it when anyone asked me how I scored in math. This led many people to think that I had done horribly, and were even more eager to find out the truth. As time went on, I got so plagued by the question of my math score, that I finally gave it away. Everyone was speechless. It was far from expected that I would only score better than 27% of all test takers in the nation, especially when I was one of the best mathematicians in my class. I have no idea how that happened. I felt like I had a strong performance overall, but something must have been wrong. I felt badly, since I was now being exploited by my fellow classmates, and when my parents found out, I felt that my presence was exploiting them. It was a terrible feeling, hopefully to never be experienced again.

In such events, there is always something to be learned. I felt badly at the time and saw everyone’s presence as condemning; yet, I came out of it realizing that I must work harder in order to avoid such spoofs. There is also a possible explanation as to why my score was so low as well. A few years later, another friend of mine who was known as one of the best English scholars, scored only better than 15% of all test takers in the spelling section. His spelling was of a high caliber, so it was quite confusing how that could have happened. The only explanation would be stray marks in the test booklet. Often times, there would be regions in the test booklets where it said no to make any marks. Perhaps accidental marks on one of those pages lead the system to get confused somehow, and made some serious grading errors. It is unfortunate that some brilliant students have fallen victim to the blunders of today’s technology, especially when such students did great work, but were put down by poor marks due to grading errors. It did not feel good to have scored so poorly, and that is why I consider it to be one of the most unflattering moments in my life.