I’ve been registered as a learner at ADL for a couple of months now, and I’ve started to work out how to fit my studies around my life. I tend to work for an hour here and there, rather than trying to get everything done in one long session. Generally, I’ve been really enjoying it – I think my weekends would be a bit boring without an hour of intellectual stimulation to break up the relaxation! It also gives me something to do when I go out; one of the best parts about the horticultural courses are that you are constantly expected to be finding or learning about new plants.

Doing all this learning has taught me some really interesting things about myself. I am very impatient when it comes to my work! At the Academy for Distance Learning there is a general policy that tutors try to mark assignments within 10 working days (usually it is faster than this). The other thing that I have realised is that some of my self-esteem is tied to my grades. That’s sad because I know grades are not supposed to be taken personally. When you get a bad or a good grade for your work it is not a reflection of who you are, it is a reflection of that particular assignment on that particular course. However, I have also come up with five times when you don’t need to worry about grades:

• At ADL, you don’t need to worry about your grade if you have a “fail” or “incomplete” mark. In these cases you can almost always redo the assignment and get a better grade.

• You don’t need to worry about your grade if it doesn’t affect the final mark for the module (for example, if you have an exam at the end). In this case, the grade is just there to tell you how important the feedback is.

• If you don’t need a good grade (for example, if the module is a pass/fail certificate), you don’t need to worry about a single poor grade.

• If you understand what you did wrong, you don’t need to worry about the grade. Assignments are learning experiences, and in order to learn you have to make mistakes!

• If you get one bad grade when your grades are usually high, you don’t need to worry about that – everyone has that ONE tough subject which they find really difficult.

What do you think? Do you agree or disagree? I’d love to hear some feedback on this one, so leave a message here or send a message to our admin team to let me know what you think.

If you’d like to sign up for an ADL distance learning course, you can find out about the options on our homepage.