Everyone can agree that tests are difficult, whether you study for six hours or none, and whether you get a grade of 100 or a 55. Some students can study for thirty minutes and get a high grade, and some can study for hours and get a low grade. Why does this happen?
How do you take a test? Has someone ever taught you how to take a test, how to silence the anxiety, the person coughing behind you, or the person yelling on the street? I had a test during a fire drill, and the teacher had us bring our computers outside to continue taking the test (needless to say, I failed). So who is to blame? Students for not studying, the fire alarm, the teacher who made us continue taking the test, or something else entirely?
What if I told you that everything is a learned skill? Nothing is completely built in. A kindergartener couldn’t walk into a Precalculus class and ace a test. I don’t know many kids in my class now that could either. Students have to slowly build up their skills, take Geometry, Algebra II, and then they can take Pre-calc with some understanding. But we’re not taught testing. We’re given smaller quizzes that lead to big tests, but not taught how to take them.
For juniors taking the SAT this year, it is a daunting task. Many students have to find tutors, and they don’t often teach them the math, or the grammar they need for the test, but instead tips and tricks like how to plug things into the DESMOS graphing calculator or how to be able to pick your answer while reading as little of the text as possible. While this is an extremely helpful tool for students taking the SAT, why are we just learning this now?
Back to the fire drill test, I don’t blame my teacher at all. I think I could have studied harder, that’s for sure. I think the issue is that I was not taught how to focus in a chaotic environment or when I am exhausted (as most high schoolers are). When taking a timed test you can’t set it down and come back to it and not be racing against the clock.
It raises the question, why aren’t we taught this? Why aren’t we taught a lot of things about how to take tests?
Schools stopped teaching grammar in the 80s because the way it was taught was seen as too time consuming and would hurt students’ learning, so it was cut from the curriculum. Now students, adults even, struggle with writing a coherent sentence. And as state tests have begun to move online, this skill is needed less because your computer fixes the mistakes for you. But it is still a skill that you should know, not just for essays or the SAT, but in life as well.
We live in a society where schools care so much about our mental health (which is not a bad thing) that they don’t teach us critical skills we need. Students are not taught how to take tests because they cause anxiety and they don’t measure a students creativity, but the reason that students are anxious about test taking is that they don’t know how to take one.
With anything in life, you feel more anxious the less you know, so when a student doesn’t study for a test they feel a lot more anxious than a student who did. Just like if you know a snake is not venomous, you will be less afraid of it than a person who is not in the know.
It is a cycle, we are not taught something because it would cause too much anxiety, and then we feel anxious because we were not taught something.
Taking tests can cause anxiety, but being taught how to manage that anxiety is the first stepping stone to being able to take larger tests in the future.
These steps can help the future generations manage stressors in their environments so that they could take a test with someone coughing behind them, or in a fire drill, and ace it.