I was sitting at the front desk with my coworker as she struggled over her statistics homework. She read aloud, “What is the expected value of the number of even cards in a hand of six cards dealt?” I sensed statistics and instinctively turned my head to her computer screen to take a look at the question myself.

She began adding together the values of all of the possible even numbers in a deck of cards and came up with a number that I knew was incorrect. “No, no. To find expected value, you have to calculate the fraction of even cards in a deck…” I went on for a few moments explaining the concept to her, and she eventually understood and got the correct answer.

I sat there, surprised with myself, as I recalled the 30 percent that I got on my first midterm for statistics, the 32 percent that followed and an eventual barely passing score on the final. I spent many hours slaving over problem sets, studying for quizzes and dreading the exams, but ultimately barely made it out alive.

You can understand my surprise, almost a year later, teaching someone else the concepts of the class off the top of my head. Not only that, but the answer was correct and she understood.

No matter what my knowledge of statistics really is, my transcript will still forever have a big, fat C on it. The C that I earned my very first semester at Berkeley, the C that would make me have to work twice as hard to get into my intended major, the C that would make it that much less likely that I would get admitted into a top PhD program and above all, the C that made me feel like I didn’t belong here.

All of my close friends and the majority of my acquaintances flinched at the thought of getting so much as a B, and I silently judged myself for not being good enough. My mother would casually suggest prestigious internship opportunities for me and I sunk at every mention, because while I may have made the cut in high school, I knew that I wasn’t good enough for them now. My big, fat C held me securely on the ground where I was.

Bad grades can affect job prospects, academic prospects, your perception of yourself and even the way that others perceive you. People might assume that you don’t work hard enough, you don’t have good time management skills, you don’t prioritize correctly or you just aren’t as smart as other people.

Bad grades can also make you push yourself harder than ever before and make you reevaluate the way that you learn. It’s a shame that so much emphasis goes on grades because it encourages learning practices that are catered toward performing on exams rather than sustaining a long-term understanding of the concept for many years to come. My grandmother, a Cal alumna, recently told me that she doesn’t recall any calculus that she learned in Math 1A and 1B, but she used memorization methods to pass the exams since they were required for her degree. This is the epitome of grades being prioritized over learning material, both in student mentality and institutional practices.

I came into the class with a plethora of basic statistics knowledge, which meant that a majority of the class was material that I had already seen before. Despite this advantage, I simply did not perform well on the rigorous exams that were presented. Looking back on it, the class was very demanding, and I should have taken it later in my college career. At the same time, I realize that the grade that I got in the class isn’t necessarily indicative of my knowledge on the subject; the former can definitely come without the latter.

When I was in the 11th grade, my chemistry teacher gave us a scenario: If you had to choose between getting an A in a class but understanding nothing or failing a class but learning and understanding extremely well, which would you choose? We were instructed to go to the left side of the room for the A and the right side of the room for failing. I watched my classmates disseminate as we silently judged each other’s morals. The room was split almost completely 50-50 and even now, I don’t remember which side I chose.

What I know today is that if an A isn’t actually representative of knowledge, it loses all meaning, it becomes a mere figment of your imagination and the imaginations of those around you. Failing is raw. Failing challenges you in a way that makes you question your abilities and your knowledge and pushes you to prove what you really know. I think that if there’s anything my first year at Berkeley taught me, it’s that I would choose failing every time.

Elena Stacy writes a weekly column on finding confidence and managing stress on the way to adulthood.