Intelligence Testing and Test Anxiety
Stephanie was a very intelligent and brilliant young woman. She used to study biology in university and was very motivated to apply to medical school after her undergraduate degree. She used to have very good grades in her classes and was proud of her accomplishments. Although Stephanie was doing very well in University, she was also very neurotic and anxious. She had a lot of anxiety prior to taking examinations.
One day, in one of her classes, a professor from the psychology department made an announcement saying that they were offering intelligence Quotient testing to students interested. Stephanie decided to participate, as she had always been curious on the kind of questions such tests ask.
On the night prior to the day of the IQ test, she slept very little because she felt very nervous about taking the test. The next day, she presented herself to the psychology laboratory where the test was taking place and she was highly anxious. She decided to take the test anyways.
Her anxiety made her unable to think clearly during the test. She felt highly pressured by the time constraint and her mind kept on going blank.
Her results showed that she had an IQ below the average IQ of students at her University. This affected Stephanie’s self esteem negatively because she made an internal stable attribution of her results.
Following the IQ test, Stephanie started to be even more anxious about evaluations. Her grades started dropping. Overall, she was feeling a lot of negative affect. She started feeling more and more depressed. At one point, her anxiety about school performance dragged her into a depression. She was advised by her physician to withdraw from University. She decided to follow her physician’s advice.
In a sense, her results to her IQ test was the turning point in her life that started a downward spiral of negative affectivity leading her to fall into a depression and subsequently withdrawing from university. The results to her test were probably not a valid reflection of her intelligence, but for a highly perfectionist and neurotic person like Stephanie, it was difficult for her to think rationally about these results.
The aim of this story it to show that it is important to take into account situational and personal characteristics when administering Intelligence Tests. Taking into account such factors would highly increase the validity of such tests.
A study by Hopko et al., (2005), has shown that test anxiety had a substantial negative impact on intelligence test performance of university undergraduates. This shows that the case of Stephanie might not be an isolated scenario. Probably not everyone would react the way Stephanie did. Still, these results show that further research in this field is needed. There is no doubt that Intelligence tests have significant predictive validity, but it is important to take into account attenuating factors. As Hopko et al., claim, “A more systematic method is required to precisely determine and control for the impact of anxiety symptoms and/or disorders”.
References
Hopko, D., Crittendon, J., Grant, E., & Wilson, S. (2005). The impact of anxiety on performance IQ. Anxiety, Stress & Coping, 18 (1), 17–35.
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