Self-Induced Pressure In College

At the beginning of my first ever college class I was still a senior in high school, I had no idea what a professor wanted from me or how to undertake the extensive amount of weekly work. My first thought is to see how much my classmates are writing and to ask, “How many pages is yours?” I soon began to write to how much everyone else was writing instead of thinking about if I was giving the right information or not. It’s not about the length of a paper or the pre-writing, it’s about depth and giving the right information. Self-induced pressure causes students like myself to set higher standards than needed for their grades. Zinsser proclaims a very accurate statement, “A is for Admirable and B is for Borderline, even though, in Yale’s official system of grading, A means excellent and B means very good. Today, looking very good is no longer good enough.” (438). I have always been a student that anything below an A was disappointing to me. Up until my first college class I had to accept that a B was okay, it wasn’t easy after being a straight A student in high school.