I am a terrible test taker. Huge anxiety. I freeze up. I read the sentence and it’s like trying to listen to someone while a train whistle is blowing. It just doesn’t get in. I’ve been phobic of tests since 5th grade. We took placement tests to see what we knew and they would stick us in a class and that was it, my destiny of learning was established in a half hour.
Don’t even try and tell me that the teachers of advanced classes are the same as remedial ones, I’ve been in both and trust me when I say the remedial teachers should stick to coaching baseball.
In 10th grade I took advanced placement American History. Our teacher was an ex-college professor, I’m pretty sure he was a doctor of history. He treated us as college kids - what a relief it was. We had infrequent exams and basically a giant text book he taught from and we learned. There wasn’t any worksheets, study guides, no coloring books or fill-in-the-blanks. The exams were bluebook essays - you knew the answer or you didn’t.
I would read and reread, highlight and take notes on my notes of any highlighted notes. Before the exam we would cram and I had a photographic memory of the page number, the captions, the photos, the American history was in my head. Then came test day, I would read the question and then reread it, and my anxiety was like a diffuser filtering away a whole hemisphere of my brain. I went to the teacher and asked him for advice and he told me that maybe my brain wasn’t developed enough yet. Now, I really liked this guy and respected him, but maybe a little sugar coating might have been prudent.
This was my curse, my lot in life. Not good at tests. My ACT tests scores were atrocious, my SAT scores were nominal. I took one of those SAT ‘make your score better’ courses and my SAT scores actually dropped by 20 points. When it came to college I knew I was going to be handicapped. Maybe I am dyslexic or something? This was the thought that went through my mind. I studied and studied hard but also felt that even if I studied hard it may not matter. I resigned that the scores and the grades became second for me. I just delved into what I was learning and took the focus away from trying to ace the tests, but rather to just learn cool shit that I could somehow apply to the world.
Things changed for me in my sophomore year of college at the University of Minnesota. I was enrolled in physics, which based upon my experience with physics in high school was going to be a challenge. My favorite thing about the class was the text, the history and how the scientist’s invented the theories. Of course, the exam never really asked the political strife Isaac Newton underwent and his conflicts with the Queen of England; nor how he was obsessed with being the first to create the philosophers stone, and how he was using science in the name of God and how this alienated himself from the rest of his community.
Nope, they didn’t ask us anything about that. And to this day most of us know that Force = Mass times Acceleration, but I doubt that many people know that Newton inadvertently invented calculus while experimenting with optics and light.
But, I had to get grades. So, I worked up a different strategy. It wasn’t really cheating but it wasn’t exactly blindly reading the textbook and hope my brain doesn’t decide to freeze up like my Bronco II on the ice and snow on a thin road in Newport MN, I needed a work around.
I began to study the professor. What kind of guy is he? Does he like sports? Is he passionate about the material or teaching? Where did he come from? The idea was to read and study the material but through the eyes of him? I needed to get to know the professor enough to predict the questions he was going to ask on the exam. Was he going to be sneaky? Was he going to test us on the text, or on the lecture, or a mix? I learned this from watching Captain Kirk and how he mastered the Kobayashi Maru.
The physics class had five tests per quarter 10 questions each exam. Our grade was curved on a total of 50 points. After the second test I deduced the professor was better at physics than people, he loved science it was his thing. He was a good teacher, not into it as he could have been. He liked testing on lecture material, even more weight on class and blackboard notes than the text. It became clear to me that if I analyzed the total number of people in the auditorium and counted all who participated by showing up I could accurately predict how good or bad the curve would be. This caught on to the people who sat around me, Peter and Eric, and Bridget and Sally, all wanted to know what the numbers were the day before the test. There were 287 enrolled students in the class and between tests about 210-260 that would attend class daily. That is a big discrepancy and the less that would show up on average to class the better the curve. The numbers spoke for themselves.
As the weeks passed the test scores would come in and sure enough they didn’t lie. Certain segments of physics were more difficult - I also began to see the professor wanting higher scores. It got to the point that I picked up the professor’s tells; These were obvious statements, examples, clean clear chalk entries and he would box some of them in.
During the latter part of the second quarter the tests got earlier. Something changed and this effected my curve analysis. I discussed it with my group and informed them that he was shifting; maybe, it was pressure from outside influences, or the fact that most of the students were pre-med and they complained about how a poor grade would effect their chance at getting into medical school. Whatever the case, the numbers still were accurate, if you went to class you were going to do better.
Everything changed in the third quarter. We were assigned a new professor, all the tells were off, my social engineering had to go back to the drawing board. I continued with the experiment and the curve actually started to favor the text slightly more than the lecture. If you read the text, and mastered the book you would do better than if you favored the lecture. That was a bummer, because I’d gotten good at learning from the man and not the book.
The take-away for me was huge though. My test anxiety still existed but I learned that learning, education, teaching, studying, it’s all a dynamic process. Don’t throw in the towel if you are like me - hard work pays off regardless of grades, certifications, or the process of learning is difficult, it can be hard no matter when or how the actual knowledge will apply some day, cause it will if you believe it will.
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