Most high school and college students experience some level of exam jitters. Learn how to overcome them and make school life easier.
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Everyone has had “butterflies” at test time, but test anxiety is so much more than that. Despite being fully prepared, students who suffer this psychological condition often experience such emotional and physical stress when sitting down for a test that their mind goes totally blank and they may have to literally run away to escape the overwhelming sensations.
“Most people when they are about to be tested know there is a chance you can pass or you can fail, so it’s normal to feel some level of emotional activation,” says Debra Kissen, clinical director of the Light on Anxiety Treatment Center in Chicago. That’s good because it gathers your resources to work hard to prepare.
“It’s when the anxiety becomes more extreme that it goes beyond helpful, flooding the person with anxiety and impacting their performance and becoming so uncomfortable they’d rather avoid the situation than tolerate the feelings of anxiety that come along with it.”
Although figures vary, it’s estimated that about 16 percent of college and high school students have high test anxiety and 18 percent have moderately high test anxiety, according to psychologist and author Richard Driscoll of the American Test Anxieties Association.
Anxiety has surpassed depression as the most common mental health diagnosis among college students, according to a 2017 nationwide study of more than 160,000 students by the Center for Collegiate Mental Health at Penn State.
Additionally, the 2017 National College Health Assessment by the American College Health Association found that about 1 in 5 college students have been diagnosed with or treated for anxiety in the last year.
Anxiety disorders are the most common mental illness in the U.S., affecting 40 million adults in the United States age 18 and older, or 18.1 percent of the population, according to the Anxiety and Depression Association of America (ADAA). Anxiety disorders develop from a complex set of risk factors, including genetics, brain chemistry, personality and life events.
A constellation of factors, individually or as a cluster, can cause test anxiety, according to the ADAA. They include lack of preparation, fear of failure, a dearth of self-confidence, perfectionism, a history of poor test-taking, generalized anxiety disorder and genetics.
“Test anxiety can stem from worry about performance,” says Carol Kaufman-Scarborough, a professor at Rutgers School of Business-Camden. “This can result from a fear of a particular subject, a fear of failing, a fear of a larger impact such as not graduating and simply a fear of testing formats.”
A fierce fear of failure can launch a test anxiety sufferer into a fretting frenzy of what-ifs – I struggle to answer the questions, flunk the test, can’t proceed to the next grade, don’t graduate, can’t get into grad school, disappoint my parents, am subject to disapproval from instructors and ridicule from friends, can’t get a job, end up homeless.
While it’s not clear exactly what kind of person is prone to test anxiety, Kissen says both “nature and nurture” play a role. Those who have anxiety in their family or already have some other kind of anxiety issue are more likely to suffer from test anxiety.
Some people are just “hard-wired to be more sensitive to the feelings of anxiety,” she says. Such people often ruminate and catastrophize about “normal” anxiety.
“Certainly, perfection is strongly associated with anxiety in general,” Kissen adds, “a lack of tolerance for uncertainty in that you want to know for sure that things are going to be OK. It starts becoming more of an official disorder when one finds the sensations of normal anxiety that we all experience as intolerable or feels that the risk of failure is too intolerable.”
Symptoms of test anxiety can be emotional, physical and cognitive, and could begin weeks or even months in advance of the test. A study cited by Anxiety.org suggests that test anxiety isn’t limited to the period right before an exam, but, in fact, can begin on the first day of the class.
But, typically, the worst symptoms occur during the exam.
“Your heart beats faster, you feel like it’s hard to get a good breath, your head feels kind of disconnected, it’s hard to think clearly, you might feel hot and sweaty, your hands cold or tingly, you might feel weird or out of it, you might have gastrointestinal distress,” Kissen says. “All sensations similar to having a panic attack.”
“The worst period of test-taking is when you are sitting in the classroom and the teacher is passing out the test,” Driscoll agrees. “You’re thinking, ‘So how am I going to mess this up?'”
And there is likely no relief post-test, as the sufferer begins to dread the next time, worrying about how that one’s going to go or frantically trying to concoct ways to skip it.
“A lot of the behaviors they try to do to manage their test anxiety actually feeds the beast,” Kissen says.
There are many simple things a student can do to fend off test anxiety. What works for one student might not work for another. Check out the suggestions and strategies below. Some are no-brainers; others might be surprising. They run the gamut from very specific to test anxiety to those aimed at improving general health and well-being. Try one, some or all to find out what works for you. And don’t rule out seeking professional help.
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