Education & Career

Why do I perform better in difficult exams and average in easy ones?

Anonymous

I have always been considered a mediocre student and all my school life I secured average positions and scored average. However, things changed when there were difficult tests. I'll give a few examples. During my high school days, my school took part in an inter-school lingual skills test. It required the students to be good at English (it's our third language). My school chose the toppers and didn't consider me as a representative since I was mediocre. But one teacher insisted that I should take part. Weirdly enough, I topped all the schools from my area and even had a national rank of 24. My topper friends scored significantly lower. Again, in our final year, there was a friend of mine who always aced all the tests. But, this time our teachers decided to be a bit creative with the questions and ask things out of syllabus and in a different method. My friend's performance was mediocre, most of my classmates struggled to have the bare minimum but I scored above 90%. This raised a lot of questions among my peers and many people demanded that there was something wrong with the checking method but the teachers declared that they didn't rashly favour me.

Then for years I scored average and the covid-19 period open book exams even lowered my grades. But then my recent university semester exam, that was a bit tough and the teachers approached a different testing method made me a topper while 75% of my classmates failed.

Why does this happen?

Why do I perform better in difficult exams and average in easy ones?
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