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You’ve just got the grade on your exam and it simply doesn’t
reflect what you know you’re capable of… or all the
hard work you put into your course!
Stress can cause you to make careless mistakes or to forget things… or
even make you have trouble seeing or reading. It can get so bad
that you feel like the test paper in front of you is written in
some alien language you don’t recognize. Unfortunately the
grade you get on an exam often reflects the way stress affects
you, even though it should simply be an evaluation of how well
you understand the course material.
Experiences like this are discouraging, even depressing. But what
can you do?
As you’ll see in this booklet, there aren’t
50 ways to pass an exam. You have to know how to manage your
stress, and
above all you have to know how to study.
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STRESS AND YOUR EXAMINATION
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Let’s start with a little theory.
A number of studies suggest a close relationship between stress
levels and success; all these studies basically arrive at the
same conclusion: Stress helps to improve our efficiency, but only up
to a certain point. Once this point is reached, if stress continues
to increase, the quality of our performance begins to decline.
Here’s a simple example: imagine that someone is crossing
the road when he hears a truck driver blowing the horn some distance
away. He looks, speeds up and quickly gets to the other side. The
stress he experienced when he heard the horn had the effect of
making him change his behaviour: he sped up.
Now let’s imagine that the truck is very near
when the driver blows the horn, say ten metres away. When he hears
the horn, the
man crossing the street may freeze in his tracks. His stress level
is so high that he can’t move. We might say that his stress
is so high that it keeps him from using all his resources and intelligence
to cope with the situation, which may now appear to him to be “impossible
to resolve.”
You may not see the connection between getting
run over by a truck and failing an exam, so let’s
take a look at how stress works in the exam room.
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AT THE EXAM |
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This example explores various levels of increasing stress.
The night before the exam, you are ready for it.
You understand all the material and can even explain it to someone
else. You
go to bed
a little bit stressed (let’s call this level 1).
The next morning, you wake up and realize that the
exam is in just two hours; now your stress is rising (level 2),
but you
still have
a good grasp of the material. You are still in good shape for
the exam. When you get to the college, you notice a couple
of students
talking about the subject, which stresses you a little more
(level 3).
Surprise! All of a sudden
you find out that you forgot to study something that is on the
exam and your stress increases even
more (level 4).
You may even begin to feel a bit of panic. You look through
your notes and you can’t find the section they’re
talking about (level 5). No wonder you didn’t study
it – you
must have lost it! You have to go into the exam anyway.
You walk down the hall and see the classroom door (level
6).
You go inside and see several students frantically paging
through their notes;
the new level of stress in the room affects you (level
7). With your stress level continuously rising, you’ve
just crossed the critical point where your ability to respond
begins to decline.
The invigilator comes in and puts the exam papers
on his desk (level 8);
he goes back to the door, looks up and down the hall,
and closes the door once more (level 9). He tells everyone
to put away their books and notes and starts passing out the
exams (level 10). You are having trouble
seeing clearly, and now there’s the exam on your
desk. You read the first question and realize it isn’t
easy (level 11).
You begin to crack under the stress and the other questions
seem to be written in a foreign language. You are having
a lot of trouble
remembering the material. There are big gaps in your
memory, you can’t concentrate, and your judgment
is deserting you: you even erase the right answer and
replace it with the wrong
one.
This is how increased stress can transform a person
who is well prepared to write an exam – a person who could
even explain the exam material to someone who didn’t understand
it – into a person who doesn’t seem to understand a
thing, who doesn’t seem to have studied, and who therefore
deserves to fail.
See how easy it is to fail an exam after studying so hard? It’s just
a question of letting your stress grow and grow. Simple, isn’t it?
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A FEW POINTERS FOR CONTROLLING STRESS |
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First of all, remember that we are always living with stress from the general
environment or from events in our own lives. Family, emotions, money worries,
health problems: lots of things can keep us in a state of more or less elevated
stress that we may or may not be fully aware of. So we start out with a certain
level of stress that the exam just adds to.
Depending on what is happening in your life, you go into an exam with an
initial level of stress that may be high or low. The higher it is to begin with,
the easier it is to pass the critical point when problems begin to arise.
There really aren’t any bad methods for shedding tension;
it’s just that certain methods lend themselves more readily
to particular times or places. Here are a few suggestions that
can be used in the classroom.
A happy memory
It can be a very good idea to take a few moments during an exam to remember
a pleasant time in the past, a time when you felt especially comfortable and
relaxed.
The following method will help you “relive” a pleasant
memory: Begin by evoking images of this memory at the exact time that you felt
really
good; in other words, picture in your mind the place you were. Then think about
the sounds associated with this memory; finally bring back any other sensations
(relaxation, well-being) that you experienced at that time.
Take a minute right now to recall a good memory. Practising now will help you call it up more easily the next time you sit an exam.
A Lucky Rabbit’s Foot…
Other students like to bring something with them to the exam that they find comforting – a
girlfriend’s picture, a lucky charm, a stuffed animal, and so on. There’s
no point in judging this kind of thing. It doesn’t help to say it’s
all superstition or childishness. The “talisman” doesn’t have
to be in plain view on the desk. It can simply be slipped into a pocket. The
important thing is that, for some students, it works; it helps relieve stress,
just as recalling a happy memory does. So if it works for you, bring along your
lucky talisman without worrying what anyone thinks about it!
Our brain is like a garden; we can plant and tend all sorts of beautiful
thoughts in it, but some people let weeds sprout to such a degree that they
literally
crowd out the potential of their gardens.
If you practise thinking about the positive rather than the negative, your
stress level will diminish and you will benefit in all areas of your life. Remember
that a glass that is half-empty is also half-full and that an exam you pass,
even barely, is one you never have to take again.
Since you will be taking your exam in an unfamiliar place, such as an auditorium
or a cégep that you have never been to before, you might want to take
note of another excellent suggestion (if you can):
Pretend it is the day of the exam. Go to the site and use the same hallways,
staircases, and so on. Go into the premises, check out all the details: the colour
of the walls, where the windows, desks and blackboards are, how the whole place
is laid out. Get to know the place. Some people find it is very helpful to do
all this while listening to some pleasant, quiet music on a Walkman. Then, when
you get back home, you can visualize the exam room often while you’re listening
to the same relaxing music. Associating relaxing music with potentially stressful
images works very well for many people.
How to study and make sure
your memory doesn't desert you
The better you know the subject matter you are being tested on, the less
likely that stress will be able to make you forget everything – which
will lead to increased stress! But what can you do to reduce the risk even
further?
First, you should know that there are two kinds of memory: short-term
and long-term.
Short-term memory is what you use when you
look up a number in the phone book and remember it long enough to dial.
This is not a number
you especially want
to memorize for a long time and so you put it into your short-term memory,
which works something like a computer clip-board and is easily erased.
All
someone has to do is to distract your attention for a second when you are
about to dial and you’ll forget the number. Short-term memory is extremely
sensitive to stress, surprise, and emotion.
Unfortunately it is this short-term
memory that lots of students use when they wait until just before the exam
to cram. Many of them are surprised
to find
they forget “everything” or “almost everything” when
they run across the first hard question. A word to the wise!
Fortunately, you also have long-term memory. This is the
memory that permits you to remember your name, your father’s name, your address, and what
your friends and spouse look like. It would take quite a shock to jar these
memories loose!
Now take a couple of seconds. Call up an image of the front door
to your house or apartment from the outside – yes, that’s
right, the door to the place you live. Go ahead, try. Good. Now tell
me: Is the door handle on
the left or the right? What colour is the door? Is the lock in the
handle or above, below or beside it? Are there any marks or stains
on the door?
This image is stored in your long-term memory. What
is surprising is that you never consciously tried to remember this
information: it lodged
in your brain
without your being aware of it. Many people believe that they have
to force
themselves to learn theoretical material; they seem to have forgotten
that they never sat down at their desks to “force” themselves to learn
the route they take to get to college or their phone number, their friends’ names,
or their own front door.
The more often you put information into your short-term memory, the more this
information slips into your long-term memory, all without your even having to
try to memorize it.
So here’s some good advice:
Look at the material that will be on the exam a number of times.
“Look at” means just that: look at it without really trying to
memorize it. It’s simply a question of reading over the material, noting
the main points, the subject headings, the few words you circled in your notes
or the phrases you highlighted (the colours you used in your notes will jog
your visual memory).
All of this will help you internalize the information and reduce the chance
that stress will make you forget important points. Of course, this method
is not a substitute for other study techniques – you still have to put in
hours of serious study. But the method I am suggesting will help you visually
consolidate images of the subject matter in your memory.
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AND
HERE’S THE EXAM |
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What should you do when the exam paper arrives in front of you?
The
way you begin an exam is very important.
Many students tend to favour one of two approaches:
- Read through the entire paper and pick the easiest questions to answer
first.
- Answer the questions in order without reading through all the questions
first.
Both methods carry certain risks. This is why: if you cross your critical stress
threshold, serious problems may crop up. You must take steps to ensure that
your stress level does not increase!
Now let’s consider more closely these two approaches.
Suppose there are five questions on the test. The first question is easy
and so is the second one; the third and the fourth are hard and the fifth
is easy:
1. Read through the entire paper and pick
the easiest questions to answer first.
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Question 1. easy
Question 2. easy
Question 3. hard
Question 4. hard
Question 5. easy |
Surely you agree that reading the first two questions will not raise your
level of stress because they are easy. On the other hand, when you get to
numbers three and four, the hard ones, up goes your stress level; it is possible
that stress might make question five seem more difficult than it really is.After
reading the exam over, you are more stressed than you were and, when you
go back to question one, you’ll find it harder than if you had answered
it before reading the rest of the exam. This can trigger a real spiral of increasing
stress: stress makes an easy question harder, which in turn increases your
stress, which makes the next question even harder, and so on, until you are
looking at an exam that seems to be written in a foreign language.
2. Answer the questions in order without reading through all the questions first.
While you are writing the first answer, time is passing and you do not know
what lies in wait for you among the other questions; even an easy question
that takes time to answer may stress you out. Even if you do get to the last
question before time runs out, there is a strong chance that, because of
the harder questions before it that upped your level of stress, you may not
make as much sense as you could, especially if the question is worth 30 points
and you’re afraid you won’t have enough time to completely finish.
And don’t forget that stress may give you the bright idea
of changing some of your right answers into wrong ones!
So what’s the solution? Think about this: First, when you
get the exam paper, turn it over without looking at any questions
and write on the back
any points that you have had trouble retaining (like the eight ways of
reproducing the third dimension). List these ideas quickly in bullet
form, as a way of
clearing and relaxing your mind. You don’t know yet if any of this
is on the exam, but if it is, then you’ve got the elements written
down (= reduced tension).
Now take five or ten minutes at the most, at the start of the exam, to
read it through slowly and attentively, immediately jotting down in the margin
parts of the answer in the form of key words, notes, and so on.
As you read the first question, you note the principal elements as key-words
in pencil in the margin so you don’t forget them and then go on to
question two (easy) and do the same thing. Question
three is harder, but
you can jot down some parts of the answer right away, without lingering too
long (to avoid raising your stress level at the moment). Question
four is
really hard and you can only remember one thing about it: the answer has
something to do with an example the professor gave and which you highlighted
in your notes. So write “prof example, yellow hi-light” in the
margin. Don’t dwell on the answer but go on to Question five (an easy
one) and write the outline of your answer in the margin.
Now you have partly answered about three and a half out of five
questions
(= reduced tension). Go back to question 3 and spend some time trying
to dredge up some other parts of an answer; then do the same for question four.
After ten minutes at the most, you should be looking at the best
part of your answers (= reduced tension). All you have to
do now is write up your answers, beginning with number one, with
the help of the marginal notes and key words you wrote down. Since
your stress level is low, it is possible that your memory will “return” for
the questions you blanked on (= reduced tension).
* * *
This is the basic idea I want to pass on to you: You can control
your stress.
Remember, too, that it is important to learn how to relax and
to lead a balanced life (work, play, food, sleep, exercise, socializing,
and so on). The more relaxed you are in general, the lower your
initial stress level and the lower your risk of having stress-related
problems
on your examinations.
Michel Lemieux, psychologist
Collège de Rosemont
Adapted by Renée Dubuc
API Cégep@distance
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