Final Exams Do Not Have The Last Word
Final Exams are upon us if not crushing us. Each day the exam behemoth looms larger and larger. These exams are leading me to guard my schedule a lot more and reassess my priorities. There’s a lot riding on them! I have one worth 60% of my grade and one final essay worth 100%. For many of us, failure in our exams is not an option. Whether it means pulling all nighters, drinking more coffee, or cancelling our social plans, this time of year brings on the fight for survival!
It’s easy for these final exams to be all-consuming. How can we possibly underplay their significance? The job market is not getting any easier, nor is getting the GPA we need to make the cut. It’s hard to see how final exams are not just another necessary step in the need to survive in a competitive world so that we can reach our personal goals and be successful.
But whether you are deflated with despair in your struggles or bursting with pride in your accomplishments, your final exams do not define your life. It is not your success, but your dignity, which is the true defining mark of your life.
“Dignity sounds nice but it’s too abstract. What does it really do for us?”
Dignity is the reality that you have worth apart from what you do. To have intrinsic worth is to be valuable, somebody important, deserving of respect simply by virtue of who you are, not what you do. This means that whether you ace or fail your exams, your fundamental dignity and worth remains the same. Or to put it another way, dignity is the reality that your grades, career, or relationship right now are not where you will find worth because you already have worth.
Do you believe this?
We are culturally conditioned to disbelieve this. It’s never explicitly said this way, but your grades, who you know, how you dress, what career you attain is often considered the measure of your worth in our culture. But we have had social reformers come before us to challenge that idea and we admire them for it. Heroes like Martin Luther King Jr., Ghandi, and Abraham Lincoln all appealed to the idea that our intrinsic worth and dignity is what makes us human apart from our performance.
What does your dignity have to do with final exams? It means you are more than the sum of your GPA. It means your self worth is not dependent on your final exam marks, that you were made for more than just succeeding in life. Knowing your dignity is the beginning of personal freedom and a clue to why we have been made.
See Related Post: “Where does our dignity come from?”
Have you considered this final exam season that your dignity is what defines you, not your performance? What do you think our dignity tells us about how and why we have been made?
Tags: dignity, Final exams, performance, worth
