Internal Assessment by Lucas

Internal Assessment by Lucas - July 2023 Scholarship Essay

When I was in my junior year of high school, my IB history class assigned the Internal Assessment, a research paper worth a large portion of our grade. The assignment caused many students to obsessively work, always trying to find ways to improve their paper and somehow guess what the teacher was looking for. Unfortunately, I was one of these people. I spent countless hours grinding, straining, and sweating over this single paper. Even when the teacher told me that I was starting to overdo it, I wouldn’t listen. From citation to word-choice, I always kept editing and revising.

However, eventually this perfectionism began to decrease the quality of my paper. My focus on minute, unimportant details led me to neglect major portions of the project. Eventually, I became so overwhelmed and anxious with these errors that I was forced to leave them in the final draft. I remember how frustrated, embarrassed, and outright humiliated I felt when a friend who worked half as hard told me we got the same grade.

Afterwards, I talked to my dad about the whole experience and we brainstormed on ways I needed to improve. I began to recognize how I had overworked myself in a project that required balance to produce the best results. Unfortunately, this has been an ongoing issue throughout my life; balance has always been something I’ve struggled with, especially academically. I often viewed classwork in black and white; you either are working hard or slacking and procrastinating. While I had known that I tended to overdo many of my assignments, the Internal Assessment was the first to show me the negatives of such a strategy.

Over time, I began to develop solutions that let me break up my workload into more sizable chunks. I started to use planners and timers for each of my subjects and became a much more organized person. Not only did this improve the quality of my work, but it also allowed me to spend more time on hobbies and projects outside of school. While my failure with the Internal Assessment initially hurt, it allowed me to grow and thrive in ways I had never foreseen.