What Happens If You Fail a Midterm: The Grade Math, the Post-Mortem and a 14-Day Fix

It's the stretch of the fall term when midterm exams come back graded. If yours came back with an F, here is what happens if you fail a midterm in college: your score goes into the gradebook as one weighted piece of your course grade, and that's usually all. It doesn't go on your transcript, it doesn't set your GPA, and unless the exam carries most of the course weight, much of your grade is still to be earned.

What it costs you depends on how much the exam is worth and what's left. The answer to "can I still pass?" is a short calculation, and it's worth doing tonight, before you decide anything. After that, the useful work is taking the exam apart to find out why you lost the points, and changing how you prepare for the next one.

What happens if you fail a midterm in college

Three things usually happen, and none of them is permanent:

1. The score is recorded at its syllabus weight. A 50 on an exam worth 20% of your grade costs you 10 of those 20 points. The rest of the course is unchanged.
2. Your running grade in Canvas (or your school's system) drops. That number reflects the work graded so far. It's a snapshot, not a verdict.
3. At some schools, an official mid-semester grade or warning goes out. These are separate from your exam score. UConn, for example, has instructors of 1000- and 2000-level courses submit mid-semester grades for all enrolled students between the sixth and eighth weeks; students and advisors can see them, and they don't appear on any transcript. At the University at Buffalo, professors teaching undergraduate classes are asked to mark each student satisfactory or unsatisfactory at mid-semester, and students marked unsatisfactory are expected to go to their professor and meet with their advisor.

If you got a warning like that, an advisor may contact you. Answer them: that meeting is where you'll hear about tutoring, the withdrawal deadline and what else your school offers.

Failed a midterm: can you still pass? Do the grade math

Open the syllabus and find the grading breakdown. You need three numbers: the points you've banked so far, the weight still left, and the course grade you're aiming for. Then:

Average needed on the rest = (target − points banked) ÷ weight still left

A worked example. Say your syllabus reads: homework 20%, midterm 1 20%, midterm 2 20%, final exam 40%. Your homework average is 85 and you scored 52 on midterm 1.

• Homework banks 85 × 0.20 = 17 points, if you keep it at 85.
• Midterm 1 banks 52 × 0.20 = 10.4 points.
• That's 27.4 points banked, with 60% of the grade (midterm 2 and the final) still to come.

For a C (70), you need 70 − 27.4 = 42.6 more points out of 60, which is an average of 71% on midterm 2 and the final. Here is the whole table, plus the same course under a policy some syllabi have, where a higher final score replaces your lowest midterm:

(With replacement, the final counts for 60% and only the homework is banked, so you need 53 of the remaining 80 points for a C.)

Two things to notice. First, a 52 on a 20% exam didn't sink this course: a C needs about a 71 average from here, which is a realistic target for a student whose homework is in the 80s. Second, weight matters more than the score. Fail a midterm worth 40% with a 45, in a course where the final is the other 60%, and a C needs an 87 on the final. That's still possible, but it's a different plan.

If the arithmetic feels shaky, a course grade is a weighted average, the same math as an element's average atomic mass. Lykke's free weighted-average demo, from its Chemistry 2e course, lets you drag sliders for the weights and watch the average move. Check your syllabus for the letter cutoffs too; not every course uses 90/80/70/60.

If your class uses Canvas, you can also test scores right on its Grades page: click an assignment's score, type a hypothetical one, and the total updates. These What-If scores simulate your grade without changing the real one (Ohio State's Canvas guide shows how). Put your target scores on midterm 2 and the final and see where you land. The total follows however your instructor set up the gradebook, so check it against your own math.

Five syllabus policies to check before you panic

Each of these changes the math above, and none of them is universal. Read your syllabus and your course's Canvas page for each:

1. Drop the lowest. Some courses drop the lowest exam or quiz score. If yours does, this midterm may be the one that gets dropped, as long as you do better on the next.
2. Replacement. Some syllabi let a higher final exam score replace a low midterm, as in the table's last column.
3. Curves and scaling. If the course curves, your raw score isn't your grade. Look at what the syllabus or the professor says about scaling before you assume a 52 is an F.
4. Regrade requests. If you think a question was graded wrong, many courses accept regrade requests only within a set window after exams come back, often in writing. Ask about a specific question and say why you think it earned more credit.
5. Extra credit and late work. Know what's available, but don't plan a recovery around it. It's usually small next to an exam.

If the syllabus is silent or unclear, ask. A one-line question in office hours ("Does the final replace a low midterm in this course?") gets you a real answer.

How to recover from a bad midterm grade: take the exam apart

The most useful thing you can do this week is a post-mortem on the exam itself. Carnegie Mellon's Eberly Center calls the structured version an exam wrapper: a short reflection you fill in when an exam is returned, covering your strengths and weak spots, whether your preparation time and study methods fit the exam, and what kinds of errors you made.

You don't need a handout from your professor. Within a few days of getting the exam back, sit down with it and answer three questions in writing:

1. How did I prepare? Be honest: how many hours, starting when, doing what (rereading, homework, practice problems, flashcards, a study group).
2. Where did the points go? Go question by question and write down every point you lost.
3. What will I do differently for the next exam? Two or three specific changes, not "study more".

The evidence on wrappers is mixed, and that's worth knowing. A study of five large STEM courses at one university (intro biology, general chemistry, calculus, organic chemistry and genetics) found a modest but statistically significant link between using exam wrappers and course grades; students weren't randomly assigned, so it shows a link, not proof. A smaller study of 86 students in one course found no improvement on exams or final grades. The reflection alone won't raise a score; it helps only if it changes what you do before the next exam. That's why the third question matters most.

Sort every lost point by cause

Label each miss with one cause. The pattern usually jumps out once you count them, and each cause needs its own fix.

If most of your misses are "didn't know it", the gap may have started in your notes. Our guide to what to do within 24 hours after class covers how to close those gaps while a lecture is still fresh. If most are "couldn't recall it", the problem is how you studied, and that's the easiest one to fix.

Go to office hours with specific questions

Take the exam and your sorted list to office hours within a week. Instructors can help far more with "I lost 12 points on questions 3 and 7, both on limits at infinity; can you show me where my method broke?" than with "I don't get it."

Good questions to bring:

• Which of my mistakes do you see most often, and what fixes them?
• Is there anything in how I wrote my answers that cost me partial credit?
• What does the next exam cover, and is its format the same?
• Does the syllabus let a later score replace or offset this one?
• Where can I find more practice problems like these?

If you can't make office hours, email. Our guide to emailing a professor has six templates you can copy, including one for asking about a grade. TAs and your campus tutoring center can help with the content too.

Change how you study for the next exam

If your preparation was mostly rereading notes and doing the homework once, the research is clear on what to change.

Answer questions from memory instead of rereading. In a study published in Science, students who kept testing themselves on foreign-language vocabulary they had already learned remembered far more on a delayed test, while extra restudying added nothing (Karpicke & Roediger, 2008). The same study found that students' own predictions of how they'd do didn't match how they actually did, which is one reason an exam can go worse than you expected. A 2017 meta-analysis found practice tests beat restudying and every other comparison condition it looked at (Adesope et al.). The free AP Psychology course's section on retrieving memories explains why pulling information out of memory strengthens it.

Space your practice out. A review of 839 assessments of spaced practice across 317 experiments found that the gap between study sessions that gave the best retention grew as the time until the test grew (Cepeda et al., 2006). The free forgetting-curve simulator shows how fast new material fades without review.

Practice under exam conditions. At least once before the next exam, do a full set of problems on a timer with your notes closed. For a model of what a full timed run plus an error review looks like, the free AP Statistics course has a full-length practice exam with an error review that sorts misses by topic and error type, much like the table above, and so does AP Psychology. AP courses cover introductory college-level material, so they work as extra practice for intro stats and psych.

For a full exam-prep plan built on these methods, see how to study for midterms. If your failed midterm was in a specific course, start with that course's catch-up advice: Calculus 1 or general chemistry. When you run out of homework problems to redo, the free AP Calculus AB and AP Chemistry courses have quizzes throughout.

A 14-day recovery plan after a failed midterm

Start the day you get the exam back. This plan assumes about an hour a day for this course on top of your normal coursework.

Two rules keep this from collapsing. Keep up with current material while you repair the old: next week's lectures are on the next exam too. And make room by moving something, not by cutting sleep; our guide on what to do when you fall behind on your study schedule shows how to triage a week that won't fit.

When to think about withdrawing

Go back to your grade math. If even the replacement column shows you need near-perfect scores on everything left, or the course is taking hours your other classes need, withdrawal is worth a look. A W usually spares your GPA where an F doesn't, both can count against financial aid progress, and the withdrawal deadline on your school's academic calendar may be only weeks away. Some schools also let you switch a class to pass/fail by a separate deadline, but not every class qualifies.

Our guide to whether to drop a class compares a W, an F, pass/fail and an incomplete, covers how dropping affects financial aid, and has a section for F-1 students, athletes and scholarship holders, who have credit-hour rules to meet; F-1 students should see the international student office first. The offices that decide are your school's: talk to your academic advisor and the financial aid office before you withdraw, and check the registrar's academic calendar for the exact deadline.

If a bad grade is hitting hard

Feeling rattled after a failed exam is normal, and it passes faster once you have a plan. If it isn't passing, if you can't sleep, can't focus, or the grade is one piece of something heavier, your campus counseling center is there for exactly this; call or stop by and ask how to get an appointment. If you're in crisis or thinking about hurting yourself, call or text 988, or chat at 988lifeline.org. It's free, confidential and available 24/7.

The rest of the course is still yours to earn. To practice for the next exam, Explore has free ready-made courses with flashcards and quizzes.