Empathizing with the Examinee: Exploring the Implications of Test Anxiety

Published in

Psyc 406–2016

4 min readFeb 1, 2016

You’re staring at the clock and feeling sick to your stomach. As each tick brings you closer to that fateful “Time’s up!”, you can’t help but wonder where all your time went. You studied so hard for this exam and yet here you are: scrambling to finish and totally lacking confidence in your responses.

We’ve all been there. Faced with questions that came out of nowhere, multiple-choice where each option seemed equally false…. you get the picture. But imagine if this was ALWAYS how you felt when completing a test. Imagine if EVERY SINGLE ONE of your testing experiences was a profoundly negative one. Imagine if you faced each exam with crippling test anxiety.

Now I’ll be the first to admit that I get nervous before for an exam. Actually, that’s an understatement. I can be TERRIFIED going into an exam, even if I started studying for it weeks ago or have spent countless nights in Redpath diligently preparing. That said, no matter how stressful things get, I’m still the type of student who can calm down when it counts. For me, the lead-up to Test Day is worse than the test itself; once I enter the examination room, I feel confident and in-control.

Unfortunately, that’s not the case for everyone. Obviously it’s normal to experience some anxiety when faced with stressful situations like exams, but it’s estimated that about 16-20% of the population struggles with some level of clinically concerning high test anxiety. In some cases this can be mild, but in others it can be truly incapacitating.

Test anxiety is a hot topic in modern psychological research, with an increasing number of studies shedding light on its phenomenology and implications. In the literature, test anxiety is often defined in terms of symptoms that are behavioral (think mind blanks, inability to concentrate, or fidgeting), physiological (racing heartbeat, shortness of breath), cognitive (an excessive fear of failure, negative self-talk, catastrophizing), or emotional (helplessness, disappointment, anger). Of course, a fear for both students and test developers alike is that test anxiety can adversely affect performance—but exploring the reasons why (and the many consequences this could have) is a whole other blog entry on its own. What I will say, though, is that there’s a lot of debate regarding whether test anxiety causes or results from poor test performance. Considering how consistently modern psychological research points at test anxiety being negatively correlated with intelligence and achievement measures, it’s very likely a combination of both.

As of now, the DSM (read, the Bible of Psychiatry) does not have specific criteria for test anxiety, but it can still be diagnosed by applying criteria we use for other anxiety disorders. However, more specific measurement scales for test anxiety are actively being developed and some have already been implemented in academic settings. The hope—the big dream for sufferers—is that all this work will lead to greater accommodation on the part of test administrators. And with our schools becoming more progressive each day, I, for one, am feeling pretty optimistic.

Sources:

http://www.adaa.org/living-with-anxiety/children/test-anxiety

http://www.amtaa.org

http://cmhc.utexas.edu/testanxiety.html

http://www.dsm5.org/research/documents/bogels_sa.pdf

http://www.dsm5.org/research/documents/lebeau_sp.pdf

http://greenvillemed.sc.edu/doc/TamingTestAnxiety.pdf

https://www.kon.org/urc/v11/cale.html

http://www.psych.uw.edu/research/sarason/files/ReactionsToTests.pdf

http://www.specialservices.vcu.edu/pdfs/TestAnxiety.pdf

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/01443410020019867

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