8 Emotions When You Don’t Get The A-Level Grades You Hoped For

When you don't get the A-level grades you were expecting, it can be w wirlwind of emotions. Here are all the emotions you go through in this situation!

If you’re a college student (or I should say were) you’ve just got back your results, for some of you you’re celebrating your achievements but for the rest you’re rethinking your entire life because you didn’t get the grades you need/wanted. I want to tell you that it’s not the end of the world, lots of people don’t go to uni and make it through life, but I’m guessing you’ve heard that from everyone who you’ve told anyways. Here are 8 emotions you can relate to if you didn’t get the A-Level grades you hoped for:

1. Is this a joke?

For the first five minutes straight you think it’s a joke, like someone would come and tell you that it was a huge joke and those aren’t your A-level results, that you have actually passed with flying colours. But of course that doesn’t happen so you just sit there trying to figure out what is going on, it doesn’t hit you till a while afterwards.

2. You don’t believe you failed

After realising its not a joke you still don’t completely get the fact that you haven’t got the A-level grades you hoped for, you go into deep denial. You still think you have a chance somehow, that it isn’t so bad and you can fix the grades somehow but of course you’d have to time travel for that to happen.

3. That’s when the panic kicks in

Once you realise those are your grades and you can’t fix them you panic like crazy because you have no idea what to do. You probably won’t cry at this point but you kind of sit there with your head in your hands trying to control your breathing before you go into a full blown panic attack.

4. Now you start crying

Trying to control your breathing doesn’t work and you end up crying, if you don’t cry easily then this might happen at a later stage. You might not be crying because you’re sad, you might be crying because you have no idea what you’re going to do in the future or maybe it’s out of pure stress.

5. You regret your life choices

At this point you’ve pretty much stopped crying and start regretting the late nights, binge watching and procrastination during exam time… well more like the whole two years of college. You start wishing you had revised more, paid more attention to your teachers and stayed behind to do more work for those A-level grades.

The Typical Day Of A Cardiff University Student

6. You try to sort your life out

It takes you around an hour to get to this stage when you realise you probably don’t have enough for uni and you have to decide what to do. If uni is still something you would like to go for then you decide to get on a clearing hotline to see what is still available to you, maybe you want to redo your exams or find an apprenticeship.

7. Acceptance

I know as soon as you find out you don’t think you would be able to accept your grades but you eventually do, knowing what you’re going to do helps you accept them. With your parents and friends telling you that it’ll be okay and that it’s not the end of the world you can finally accept that it is what it is and you can’t change it. (A nice cup of hot chocolate can help too)

8. You finally move on

This can take all day but you do eventually move on and don’t completely hate yourself. You realise that it’s in the past and what you have to do is focus on the future. Don’t let three (or four) letters affect the rest of your life or define who you are, you can move on to better things.