Examination Stress - How to Beat it?

Going through the education process can be so much fun but the fear of examinations takes away all the enjoyment. The goal and the focus of students and teachers shifts from learning to ensuring good performance in the exams. Any chapter that is not important from the point of view of the exam is ignored, and the learning is mostly centered around the questions expected in the exam paper. Exams cause major stress in most students, and board exams cause even more stress. And these days there are exams throughout the year, keeping the students stressed all the time.

The education authorities have tried several changes to improve the situation. They did away with the board exams in class X to encourage learning at that level, but that increased the stress at XII level as the students had no prior experience of a board exam. They tried to do away with marks and switched to grades in class X, but that did not help the situation either. The National Curriculum Framework for School Education 2023 is another step towards rationalizing the education process. Let us see how it works out in the years to come.

Let us face it, exams are an essential part of the education process, we can not do away with them completely. But if we change the way we look at the exams, it will help reduce the stress associated with it. Currently we see our education as a race and the exams a hurdle in the middle. Our only goal is to win the race, hence we believe that we must crack each and every exam with outstanding marks. Failing an exam or scoring low in it is not at all an acceptable option.  

Now think about how you approach the situation when you go through a medical examination or health check in a hospital. What is your main concern? Is it to crack the medical test with flying colors or to find objective assessment of your health that may help your doctor take the necessary action? Why can’t we view the school exam also in the same way? 

First of all, change your focus to learning as much as you can in every subject you are taught in school. This itself will bring back the joy of learning back. Do it every day, bit by bit, build your true knowledge of the subject. 

Armed with this knowledge, take the test or exam, to assess how well you have learned the subject. It will provide you feedback about the strong areas you know well, and weak areas that needs more work. Use this feedback to work further and improve your knowledge. 

When you take this approach, the continuous evaluation schemes followed in school these days will no longer be a problem for you, and you will start looking forward to the tests, rather than feeling stressed about them.

You may be thinking, how will this approach help me prepare for an entrance exam competition in which I have to perform well to get selected? Well, competitive exams are cracked by students who have learned the subjects well, not just practiced answering a fixed set of questions. Hence, you may find that the shift of focus to learning will help you do better in competitions, and the knowledge you acquire today will come handy throughout your career in future.