The 90% principle: How to regroup after a bad mark

The VTA Method has placed a large amount of importance on how to maximize your academic potential.  However, I have been talking to some students about what happens to them after they get a bad mark back.  Quite of few of my students lose faith and start to self defeat themselves when they get a bad mark back on an assignment or test.

What is the 90% Principle?

One thing that I picked up on with successful students was how they regrouped after a less than satisfactory mark.  I’m going to call this the 90% principle.  Very simply the 90% principle is a way to look at your marks from a completely different perspective.  Instead of looking at marks as adding up to 100%, look at the marks you lose in comparison to your overall mark.  Check out the example below.

90% Principle Case Study

Let me premise this with a quick story.  One student I interviewed while putting together the VTA Method would get bad marks back and completely lost faith.  He solved the problem by reversing the philosophy in which he viewed his marks.  He looked at the marks in terms of his overall percentage and not for that particular assignment.  So instead of looking at a 60% for an assignment and freaking out over it, he instead looked at it in context of the overall mark.  So if the assignment only accounted for 5% of his grade he then would have lost approximately 3% of his overall mark on this assignment which left him with a 97%.

At his university a 4.0 was anything above a 90%, therefore if he got an 89.5 or a 99.5 he still got the same 4.0 on his transcript.  He reconfigured his mentality to only account for the overall course average rather than the individual mark.  Let me show you an example that can completely change the way you think about marks.

Let’s say you have 5 major class components.

Midterm                       25%

Final                             40%

Paper                           15%

Presentation                  10%

Class Participation        10%

Total                            100%

Let’s say you get the horrible mark back of 75% on your midterm, how does this affect your final grade?  Well if you look at it from the context of the actual mark it seems bad, switch this around however and you will have a completely different outlook.

Think of it this way, you didn’t actually get a 75% on your midterm; you got an 18.75% out of 25 in comparison to your overall mark. This is how you should rethink your marks.

Midterm                       18.75%

Final                             40%

Paper                           15%

Presentation                  10%

Class Participation        10%

Total                            93.75%

Let’s even say you don’t do to well on your final presentation and only pick up an 85%.  Let’s also say you really do well on your final and get a 95%. How does this workout for the rest of your course.

Midterm                       18.75%

Final                             38%

Paper                           12.75%

Presentation                  10%

Class Participation        10%

Total                            89.5%  SUCCESS! 4.0 GPA

So for students, who lose faith after they get a low mark back, don’t!  Just keep the 90% principle in mind and you can still bounce back from what seems like a horrible mark.  Have any of you used this method in the past or something close?  Do you thinking in this way could be helpful?  Leave a comment.

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