Examine your fears
What happens if you are overcome by test anxiety? Coach Anke Boereboom holds a course on performance anxiety reduction training for students in the Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences. According to her, it is important to examine this question. ‘You can only let something go after you’ve held it first. So examine your fears,’ she explains. Fear is a horrible emotion. Therefore, you tend to push that feeling aside, but if you do this, the fear will keep coming back.
‘Map out the messages you use to speak to yourself. Many students in my course think in terms of disaster. They see the exam lying in front of them, and instead of getting to work uninhibitedly, they are led by negative thoughts. They also relate test results to who they are. If they fail, they believe they’re also unsuccessful as a person.’

You are assessed, not judged
As soon as the exam is handed out, there it is: the doom-mongering thought, ‘I’m never going to pass.’ What should you do if that happens? Boereboom teaches her performance-anxious students to attack these doom-mongering thoughts sensibly. ‘You need to construct, so to speak, new elephant paths in your brain. If you convey other, encouraging messages to yourself, your brain will make new connections after some time. Negative thoughts are often automated and are by no means always related to reality. Ask yourself the following question: ‘How can I be so sure that I’m not going to pass? What reason do I have for assuming that?’ If you’ve studied the subject matter properly, there’s often no valid argument left.’
Many students also get anxious because they feel that they are judged (especially when doing assessments). ‘But you are being assessed. The teacher wishes you all the best and is not bent on seeing you fail.’

Relax!
Relaxation techniques can also help you leave the thought of failing the exam behind. These techniques can be learned (see box). Simone Huijbregts, student counselor in a college of higher education: ‘If fear strikes, you can also enter into a conversation with it: ‘There’s the stress, I was expecting it already. I will take a moment to focus on breathing calmly.’ ‘No,’ the voice in your head will say, ‘I don’t have time for that.’ But you were expecting that voice, too, which means you will still have the courage to take that moment to relax or breathe calmly.’

Tension is contagious
Arriving at school half an hour early and talking with your fellow students about how difficult the course actually is? Don’t do it, says Boereboom. ‘Tension is contagious. If you’re sensitive to this sort of thing, you’d better stay away from other people’s stress.’

Write it out of your system, free your working memory
It’s a proven fact that in the case of test anxiety, it’s effective to write the concerns you have about the exam out of your system. Researchers from the educational psychology department of the Erasmus University published about it, and a 2011 American study also shows that performance-anxious students who committed their thoughts and feelings to paper for ten minutes just before the start of the exam scored one point higher than their anxious fellow students who didn’t do so. If you write down your fears, you will take negative thoughts out of your working memory, and memory is freed which comes in handy during the test.

Learn from positive experiences
The happiness evoked by a good grade can be very encouraging. Student counselor Simone Huijbregts puzzles out these moments of success with her students. ‘What did you do differently? Did you start studying sooner? Did you do a relaxation exercise in advance? And would you be able to repeat these actions?’

Is it test anxiety or something else?
Huijbregts teaches her students that honesty is also part of self-examination.
‘Are you having a test anxiety attack or are you simply not well prepared?
Are you blacking out or is the math part of the test too hard for you?
If you are not well prepared, you might have planning problems. In that case, you should rather work on that than your supposed test anxiety. And if a certain course is causing you high stress, taking tutoring or studying the subject matter with a peer coach can sometimes be more effective than working on your stress symptoms.’

Visit a student counselor if…
…test anxiety is dominating your exam periods or even results in underperformance. Huijbregts: ‘Together, we examine what the student has already done and which steps he can still take. In some cases, the student counselor writes a recommendation for the institute. For example, if a student’s academic performance is normal, but he keeps failing multiple choice tests, a student counselor may recommend to the institute to give the student an exam with open questions. Incidentally, the institute is not obliged to adopt this recommendation.’

Text: Esmé van der Molen
Illustrations: Wendy van der Waal

This article was originally published in Dutch on March 2, 2015.