Spare me the fawning tweets saying your A-level results 'don't define you' – they do, and they should

I’m a teacher and I’ve seen the reality of which students do well. Plenty suffering hardship still manage to work hard and respect education enough to get their A grades. If you’ve failed, you probably have yourself to blame

‘Getting great exam results isn’t contingent on supreme intelligence – it’s a testament to hard work and resilience’ (Getty/iStock)

When I checked out the #examresults hashtag on Twitter last week on the day that Scottish exam results came out, I shook my head in despair. The same is already happening on the day of the A-level results in England. Among the “Good luck!” tweets there were many well-meaning adults sharing, to my mind, the meaningless platitude that exam results “don’t define you”.

I take issue with this for many reasons. To me, this is a sign of adults giving young people an excuse for less than stellar results when they simply haven’t put in the work or given education its true value.

Getting amazing exam grades, in my experience as a five A-grade student at A-level, a teacher and now in my work coaching students in study skills, does not come down to a genetic gift of supreme intelligence. This can certainly help. However, what trumps intelligence is consistent hard work, diligence and determination, along with deep resilience over a two-year period.

In one AS-level geography class that I taught, there was an amazing young woman. We’ll call her Ruth. She came to me with excellent GCSE results, high expectations but also a slightly unsettled family situation.

Throughout the year that I taught her, Ruth worked quietly away, always coming to me and respectfully asking for my help if there was a problem she couldn’t fix on her own. She was both modest about her achievements and determined to keep on improving. At the end of the year, she achieved her A.

In contrast, at another school I taught a young man for GCSE. One day I was returning test papers to the class. I had been disappointed by his result; he’d achieved a C and I knew he was capable of more. When I spoke to him about it he just looked at me blankly and said, “Why would I want an A?”.

His reaction said everything about his prospects. He didn’t value his education enough to strive to be the best he could be. His exam results reflected this.

Now, you might be thinking that there are exceptions where terrible things happen that excuse students from achieving high grades. On the contrary, I can think of students who have achieved despite the situation they were in.

One reader of my blog last year achieved five A*s at A-level and went to Oxford despite having lost her mother, being hospitalised because of fierce physical bullying and watching her older sister suffer from cancer.

A coaching client of mine achieved 10 A*s and two As at GCSE while being the sole carer for a mother with mental health problems.

If you can’t be defined by your actions and attitudes, and the ensuing results, what can you be defined by? GCSE and A-level grades are a way of neatly summarising how you went about studying for your exams. If you worked hard, consistently tackling your weaknesses, getting to grips with past papers and picking yourself up over and over again when you didn’t quite get the grades you wanted, you deserve your amazing set of grades.

Those grades signal to universities and employers what you’re made of – the kind of traits and attitudes they can expect to see if they take you on. When adults tell young people that their results “don’t define them” to make those with average and poor results feel better, they belittle and demean what those with the best grades have achieved.

For me, I learned more than was useful to me in the long-term from the way I approached my exams than from what I was actually tested on. Self-discipline, time management, problem-solving, determination and resilience are characteristics that I developed in pursuing the best grades, all of which have served me in a way that knowing how DNA replicates never has.

This is really a question for society. Do we want to encourage our young people to strive for excellence in their education? Or are we content to send the message to them that education is a low value pursuit? I know what I think. What about you?