On Examination Pressure in Students

Just some quick thoughts on exams. It’s just been the exam period at universities and, marking strikes aside[1], I noticed a few things in the examination answers that set my brain whirring.

It can’t be denied that exams are stressful. End-of-year exams especially are high pressure because they are high-stakes; they often carry the weight of the entire semester with them in a single sitting! Extreme levels of make or break, especially when University costs £10k a year. The later you fail, the more cost is sunk. This isn’t the sunk cost fallacy either, it’s an actual, real sunk cost! If you drop out in Year 3, you’ve effectively lost £30k plus expenses. Insanity really, which is why we’re trying to address it in the physics department at the University of Leeds. But currently, it is still this way.

Anyone who has marked an exam may be bewildered by some of the solutions or answers that students submit. In physics, we often get nonsense answers to written questions, or attempts at mathematics and equations which have never been taught. Sometimes students will simply use a random equation from out of nowhere because it has a similar symbol in in. In physics, “E” oftens means some form of energy but “E” often means electric field. Hence, in electro-magnetism exams, students will use the wrong equation simply because it has the right letter in it. A trained physicist knows that you can use any symbol you want, and you know what? Students know this too! So why do they do it? Here’s my hypothesis.

Ben’s Hypothesis

A couple of papers recently came out that show some surprising results. John Jerrim has found that so-called “test anxiety” did not affect the grades of a national cohort of GCSE students[2]. Similarly, Theobold et al. went further and found that this is the case when knowledge is controlled for[3]. In other words, test anxiety appears to affect the revision period, not the exams themselves. Why might this be?

Daniel Kahneman’s famous book “Thinking, Fast and Slow”[4] distinguishes between two types of attention. There is the slow, methodical brain responsible for the so-called “higher functions” such as reasoning and rational deduction, and there is the fast brain, responsible for reactive decisions, evolved to be potentially life or death (so-called fight/flight response, since expanded to include freeze/fawn). From this perspective, we may view an exam as a literal threat. A modern danger, like a master martial artist, that says “if you don’t defeat me, I will kick you out of this University and cost you £10k for each year past”. That is a serious threat! And students cannot run away (although some do), because the stakes are too high. Thus an exam can easily generate the fight/flight response.

Consider then that the revision period requires calm and focused attention, to properly engage with the material. One must learn how to fight in order to effectively engage with the master. Learning this way is (almost) uniquely human, and requires the slow thinking brain. However, if test anxiety generates a fear response and forces a student into the fast thinking mode, then they will not be able to learn effectively and thus, may not do as well in the exam. We can even draw a parallel with students fearing being incorrect and a trainee martial artist being afraid to get hit during the training period. Both of these prevent proper learning from occuring[5]. However, if information has been learned such that it can be easily, reactively summoned by recall, then even if the fast thinking brain emerges during the exam, it will be able to quickly summon the correct information required to save the student from the effective threat of each exam question, like a martial artist reactively blocking an incoming strike.

But what if the student hasn’t revised correctly, and goes into the exam? This is like a somone who isn’t trained in fighting having to fight a master. Have you ever seen someone who doesn’t know how to fight try to defend themselves? They don’t know how to respond to the threat and they just thrash out wildly, struggling, waving their arms, or cowering. I posit that this is exactly what we see when students write nonsense answers in their exams. It is the fight/flight/freeze/fawn response. They are unsure how to engage the attacking exam question, then cannot run, and thus reactively struggling and throw out any answer that sticks.

Conclusions

So what can we do? Well, as educators, we can recognise that while it is sometimes good to measure how people think under pressure (think medical doctors), our students are academics, and the true measure of someone’s deep and introspective understanding is not how they think fast, but how they think slow. Even though pressure apparently does not affect exam performance, I argue that exams are not measuring the correct thing anyway, so that performance may be an insufficient measure.

Many scholars argue for the introduction of alternative measures of competance. Winstone et al. argue for the separation of assessment of competance, and the feedback which yields learning[6]. At the University of Leeds, ideas are being trialed in which all students must get at least a pass mark in continuous courseworks before they can even sit the exam, thus taking the pressure of absolute failure out of the exam and enabling us to potentially set more introspective questions. I dunno what the correct solution is other than massive societal shift, but I like this hypothesis!

Bibliography

[1] McDougall, R. (2023). ‘University staff strike amid wage cut row over marking boycott‘, The Independent, 16/06/2023

[2] Jerrim, J. (2023). ‘Test anxiety: Is it associated with performance in high-stakes examinations?’, Oxford Review of Education, 49(3), 321-341.

[3] Theobald, M. et al. (2022). ‘Test Anxiety Does Not Predict Exam Performance When Knowledge Is Controlled For: Strong Evidence Against the Interference Hypothesis of Test Anxiety‘, Psychol. Sci., 33(12), 2073-2083.

[4] Kahneman, D. (2011). ‘Thinking, Fast and Slow’. Penguin Books, London.

[5] Zhou, Q. et al. (2020). ‘Don’t Be Afraid to Fail Because You Can Learn From It! How Intrinsic Motivation Leads to Enhanced Self-Development and Benevolent Leadership as a Boundary Condition’, Front. Psychol., 11, 699.

[6] Winstone, N.E. et al. (2022). ‘The need to disentangle assessment and feedback in higher education‘, Studies in Higher Education, 47(3), 656-667.