I was in gifted classes growing up, but it felt like a big fraud. I never really did any of the work, so my grades were always mediocre at best. But then testing came around and I'd score in the top %s, and continue to get placed in classes I wasn't willing to work hard enough to succeed at. It was this treadmill of failure and shame. It was really really awful, but my mom always said if I placed that high I had to take those classes, so I just kept going. It was definitely a pretty damaging process.