Teach students to manage test anxiety, not avoid it

My older sister taught me how to take tests. It's not a measure of your worth as a human being, she said. "It's a game." You play by figuring out what the person who wrote the test thinks is the right answer and putting that in.

I was surprised when she threw up before leaving to take the SAT exam. She came home after the test, took her temperature -- it was 104 -- and spent a week in bed with the flu. She got an 800 on the verbal.

I've always been suspicious of people who dismiss disappointing test scores by saying their child "just doesn't test well" or suffers from anxiety. Perhaps he doesn't study well. Anxiety may be a reasonable response to poor preparation.

Test anxiety is a weak predictor of test results, write psychologists Alex Jordan and Ben Lovett, authors of Overcoming Text Anxiety, in Education Week. What counts is knowledge. Furthermore, it's not that students go blank during the test. It's that anxious students "don't study very well."

"Testing is back," they write. "In response to widespread student use of AI for homework, many teachers have shifted grading toward in-class exams" and "many colleges have reversed their pandemic-era retreat from the SAT and ACT."

Standardized testing is the only check we have on rampant grade inflation.

In a classic 1962 study, the psychologists write, "students performed the same on SAT sections that counted toward official scores as they did on optional sections that they knew didn’t count." Removing the pressure didn't help.

In a 2022 study, "anxious medical students earned slightly lower test scores on a licensing exam, "but once researchers accounted for students’ knowledge before the exam, test anxiety no longer predicted test scores.

"Anxious students often procrastinate and gravitate toward less stressful study methods, such as re-reading notes, highlighting passages, or reviewing a chatbot’s summary," Jordan and Lovett write. They avoid the most effective, but most anxiety-producing strategy: testing themselves and completing practice problems.

Telling students to calm down or giving them extra time on tests "implies they can perform only when less stressed," they write. It's more useful to tell them that stress is normal and sometimes helpful. You're getting a burst of adrenalin to meet a challenge.

"High-stakes tests reward knowledge, not serenity, and the top-scoring students are rarely the calmest," Jordan and Lovett conclude. "They’re the ones who’ve spent study sessions pushing through the discomfort of getting things wrong, until they get them right."

In my day, test prep hadn't been invented. A few people studied vocabulary lists before the SATs, but most of us thought it wouldn't make a difference.

Years later, my daughter worked as an SAT tutor. She said the students who needed the least help worked the hardest, while those with the lowest scores on practice tests put in the least effort.