“Ugh. I know I did terrible. I’m just not a good test-taker.”
I heard one of my friends make these statements as we exited the site of our 3-hour AP Biology exam freshmen year.
I remember feeling a mixture of exhaustion, nervousness, and optimism about my performance. But when I heard those words coming from my friend, the first two stayed and the last one left.
I started to doubt my own test-taking strategy, think of myself as an anxious test-taker as well, and feel not-so-hot about my results.
Don’t you just wish test-taking was easy, like brewing a cup of coffee in a machine? For many students, it’s more like grinding the coffee beans from scratch- blindfolded- and brewing it over a campfire.
Test anxiety is a common experience among many students. Some have cracked down how to deal with it, while others still suffer the side effects.
To fully eliminate this stress and anxiety regarding test-taking, you must prepare wisely beforehand and tackle the test strategically. Below are my top 7 tips to relieve test anxiety.
1. Do NOT Procrastinate
If you really want to do well on a test and not feel anxious about it or in the middle of it, then you can’t afford to procrastinate till last minute. Cramming for exams is the worst thing you can do, for both information retention and your mental health. The truth is that if you procrastinate on your studying, you will end up not being confident in your abilities. And anxious you will be.
I know that just thinking about all of your daunting tasks can make you feel overwhelmed and stressed, but procrastinating on them because of how overwhelming they are doesn’t make them go away and it doesn’t make you feel any better. The smart way to tackle anything uncertain is to be prepared. As prepared as preparation can get.
So, tackle each study session slowly, gradually, and optimistically. Split your tasks into small chunks and focus on each chunk separately. One by one, you will have completed it all. Life is a marathon, not a sprint. You will be surprised by how far you can go if you just keep making little progress daily in the right direction.
2. Summarize!
Once you have gotten yourself to study, you need to know what to actually study and focus your time on. And to that end, I say: summarize.
There is absolutely no point in trying to write down every tiny detail you come across in a textbook, lecture, or video. It is much smarter to focus on key concepts, main ideas, and essential points. You need to know the essence of what you are learning and its broader implications, not the nitty gritty details that probably don’t matter unless you are competing in a jeopardy contest or a knowledge bowl.
Break each unit into chapters, and each chapter into sections, and each section into the 3-5 main points, ideas, equations, events, people, or dates that you need to retain. If you do not know how to create an efficient study guide, then check out this post.
This way, you will focus your time on what you really need to know to be prepared for the assessment, and when test day comes, you will be confident in the things you know.
3. Use Spaced Repetition
Although some students manage to get good grades with crammed studying, it is not effective for the long term. Cramming is a form of procrastination. And while it may feel glamorous in the moment, its consequences are never good.
Instead, I urge you to use spaced-repetition. This is a style of learning wherein you take the information you need to learn and try to remember it in intervals. The pieces of information that you retain easily get spaced out farther, while the difficult ones get repeated in more frequent intervals.
If you’ve ever used flashcards or Quizlet to study, then you have used this method.
What are the best types of information to learn using this method? Well, spaced-repetition is effective for a wide range of subjects, including: language learning, literature vocabulary, science and math equations, and historical dates/events/names.
My favorite free apps to use are: Anki, Brainscape, Quizlet, Chegg Prep, and IDoRecall.
4. Stay Organized
One of the biggest causes of test anxiety is a lack of organization. Students don’t know what to keep track of and how to keep track of it. Everything gets piled up in heaps of deadlines, due dates, and event times.
The most basic step is to have a planner or calendar with your test dates, the dates of your study sessions, and any other event related to your tests marked down.
Use systems that benefit you. Maintain a routine/style in which you carry out tasks related to studying or exams. If you love color-coding your notes, then go for it. If you love making revision to-do lists and sticking post-it notes in your most visible locations, then by all means do that. Use whatever works for you (calendars, schedules, timetables, accordion files, etc.). Just make sure that when test day comes, there is absolutely no doubt in your mind about where one piece of information is or where you placed a needed document.
5. Review & Revise. Revise & Review.
One of my favorite phrases to repeat to myself while studying or testing is: “Double check yourself… before you double wreck yourself.” You cannot imagine how many mistakes and lost points I redeemed for myself when I double checked my work and reviewed everything once, twice, and even up to five times!
I don’t believe in inborn talent. I don’t believe that natural ability is the predecessor of success. I believe that brute work is. And that means you must have the willingness to focus on the same thing for long periods of time, to perfect it and make it the best it can be.
If you have already studied a topic many times, review it again. If you have already written that essay and edited it, revise one more time. You can never go wrong with double checking. If anything, it will only save you from many tiny (or not) mistakes that you could have turned-in for the final product. Of course there is a limit to how long you should focus on something, but most likely you will get a gut feeling when something is as good as it’s going to get.
6. Visualize
Many people feel a lot of anxiety before a specific event out of the fear of failure. Fear is such a crippling force. It deadens the creative process and shuts off your right cerebral hemisphere, which is responsible for artistic expression and strategic action.
Fear arouses your sympathetic state of being, and all the tendencies associated with it that aren’t necessarily conducive to high performance. Fear also overstimulates your neural activity, which releases excessive dopamine, leading to overthinking and an inability to concentrate.
The best way to counter that is to make a conscious effort to calm your mind and make it think thoughts that you put into it on purpose. That means to visualize success instead of repeating negative thoughts produced by fear. Close your eyes and imagine exactly what you want to happen and how you will go about solving certain problems, answering specific questions, or dealing with particular scenarios.
Create in your mind what you want to happen in reality.
Why?
Because your brain can’t tell the difference between something you are physically experiencing and something you are mentally creating. To your brain, they are one and the same process. And so, when it comes time to actually take the test, your brain will go into “execution mode,” simply because you have already been there. You are acting out of an experienced state because you have taken the time to actually shape your own neural routes by visualizing the experience beforehand.
7. Sleep
Sleep is not only a vital process for physical wellbeing and biological health, but also for high cognition and mental endurance. It is not enough to just get a good night’s sleep the day before a test, you have to keep up a constant habit of good sleep.
A lack of sleep causes cognitive decline, or at the very least, sub-optimal cognition.
Pulling all-nighters too frequently and staying up late working on projects, studying, or homework is not going to benefit you in the long-run. You need to be sharp and have heightened senses at all times during the day for whatever reason (tests, athletic events, social obligations, etc.). A lack of sleep does exactly the opposite. It slows your response time, decreases your memory retention, and increases the occurrence of emotional states associated with psychological disorders like anxiety (ehm, ehm), paranoia, and depression.
If you seriously want to avoid test anxiety, then you have got to get enough sleep every single night and be at a stable mental and emotional state. This is the most foundational element of any talk regarding high performance.
Conclusion:
- Don’t procrastinate. Instead, break your study sessions into smaller chunks and gradually work your way through each.
- Stay organized with systems and tools that can help you stay accountable and motivated.
- Never go into a test without having studied all the content that you will be tested on. The only way to be confident in yourself during a test is to actually thoroughly know everything you learned.
- Stay healthy mentally. Keep yourself sharp by maintaining a standard of healthy habits like visualization and sleep.