2 - 7 - 18 Exam Season and Facing Challenges in General

I don’t remember ever having terrible test anxiety, but I think until recently that’s only been because of practice. I just knew that if I didn’t do well, I’d be taking the test again. I took the ACT five or six times and the SAT three or four times. So, though it was a pretty unpleasant experience, just in terms of sitting still in a room working for four hours or something, it wasn’t too stressful. Mom usually took me out to a nice lunch after so it was all good.

College exams are quite a bit different. They nearly always come after the drop without a W deadline, meaning you can’t get out without the withdrawal showing up on your transcript. I actually did withdraw before the W deadline once, which was for EECS 280 back when I thought I was going into computer science.

But anyways, you generally can’t retake the exam, and unless you want to set yourself back on your progress in the degree you don’t want to drop any classes, especially if they’ll show up as a W. Furthermore, if you’re looking to go to graduate school as I am, your GPA matters. Whereas, so far as I understand, most employers care more about things other than your GPA provided that you passed all your classes. (If you’re pursuing a job directly after a Bachelor’s degree.)

So it seems like it might be a lot of pressure, and I think it could affect people pretty strongly, and seems to. I didn’t have a conscious strategy for dealing with test anxiety until last semester.

I realized that I don’t get anxious about homework, I just do it. I don’t get anxious about projects, I just do them. If I can set a goal in the real world, especially if it’s relatively straightforward, it usually doesn’t cause me much stress regardless of how difficult it might be. An example might be squatting. I’m hoping to hit 400 pounds for my max next week, which is a somewhat lofty goal for someone who weighs 220.

But I don’t find that intimidating at all, because the road there has been so simple. Not that I’ve been doing the same lifting schemes or eating the same the whole time, but getting to that level of strength is a pretty well-understood process. (Getting to elite levels of strength maybe not so much). So if I don’t know, I know I can find out relatively easily. And the greatest difficulty in that pursuit is just consistently putting in effort in the rack. No big deal.

But if you’ve got an exam coming up you can’t do anything about it before it comes. You can’t take it early, or start working on the questions ahead of time. So my strategy this past semester was to recognize the grades I needed on the exam to get the grade I wanted in the class, and plan practice and study assignments accordingly. One of my classes I needed something like a ninety-eight percent to get an A, so I made a really ambitious and rigorous preparation assignment for myself and made sure to complete it before the exam. One of my classes I needed a 70 to get an A, I didn’t try too hard studying for that one.

This isn’t really new advice but I think the generalization can be quite powerful.

If you’ve got any kind of examination or challenge coming up, demystify it. Look at people who have succeeded at that, look at what they do, start to get an idea of the kind of person and the kind of mindset that is successful in that moment. Then take the time to craft a preparation you believe (You gotta believe!) will mold you into the kind of person you see succeeding in that moment.

Put the time in, finish that program that you still fully believe will fully prepare you (or at least prepare you to the best of your abilities given the situational and time constraints, you’ll never be fully prepared for anything) and once you finish that program, keep believing that the program changes people into the kind of people who are prepared. Thereby you don’t actually have to believe in yourself! Kinda dark but I find it a lot easier to believe in a system or program’s impact than to get a really good idea of what my own traits are.

You want to run a marathon? How do marathoners train? Find one that is about your height, build, motivation, etc and copy what they do. Don’t imitate the fastest guy, or the one who inspires you the most, imitate the one you can actually imitate!

I’m a big believer in the “you are what you do” frame of mind and this meshes with it really well.

Once you go through that program, you can honestly say that you’ve done all you can do. You can hang your hat on the effort you’ve put in and feel fully confident in handing the result over to God or fate or whatever you believe in.

If you’re handing over the result to God I think you almost need to have already gone through doing whatever you can do about it. There’s a St. Augustine quote about “Work as if everything depended on you, pray as if everything depended on God.”

Personally, I don’t feel comfortable bringing a petition unless I’ve really exhausted myself trying to fix it. Oftentimes when I do bring a petition I’ll get an idea for another avenue to try – I couldn’t be convinced that’s a coincidence. If you think about it, God’s favorite method for making change in our world seems to be through his children. It kind of accomplishes a double purpose in that good gets done, and we develop in our faith and strength.

Putting the work in is what will really allow you to give it up to God.