This article opens with a discussion of the effect that uncontrolled test anxiety can have on your GRE score and goes on to share an easy research-backed intervention that you can do on your test morning or the evening before to walk into the GRE with confidence and get the score you deserve. This is Part 1 of a two-part article series on how to manage test anxiety.
Test anxiety is a common problem among GRE takers; this is not surprising considering that the test score impacts one’s application outcomes and the likelihood of getting scholarships. While many students manage to override their score-related-stress during the test, some succumb to it. I recently met a GRE student who was so nervous going into the test that his brain simply froze when his first quant section appeared and, when he came back to himself, the voice in his head berated him for having wasted many precious minutes in the “all-important” first section; he went through the remaining test with the despair that all was now lost and scored way lower than he had in any of his recent mocks.
His very desire to not mess it up made him mess it up.
His is not an unusual case. The more high-stakes you make the test to be – the more you psych yourself into believing that it is “do or die” – the more will be your likelihood of underperformance and getting a score lower than what you should as per your current skill level. There is a name for this phenomenon: choking under pressure.
The desire to perform as well as possible in situations with a high degree of personally felt importance is thought to create performance pressure. . . Paradoxically, despite the fact that performance pressure results from aspirations to do one’s best, pressure-packed situations are often where suboptimal skill execution is most visible. The term choking under pressure has been used to describe this
phenomenon.Choking, defined as performing more poorly than expected given one’s skill level, is thought to occur across diverse task domains where incentives for optimal performance are at a maximum.
In everyday life, people talk about “bricks” in basketball when the game-winning shot is on the line, “yips” in golf when an easy 3-foot putt to win the tournament stops short, or “cracking” in important test-taking situations where a course grade or college admission is at stake as unmistakable instances of such incentive or pressure-induced performance decrements.
Sian L. Beilock et al, Choking Under Pressure in
Mathematical Problem Solving (2004)
Why do people choke under pressure?
Our working memory is a short-term memory system involved in the control and regulation of a limited amount of information that is immediately relevant to the task at hand. It can handle only about 7 chunks of information at an average.
Think of the working memory as the stage of our mental theater; this stage is so small that only 7 actors can stand on it at one time. Our real-time intelligence is an improv play created extemporaneously by these 7 actors.
When you are working intently on a GRE question, your working memory is likely loaded to full capacity, because the process of solving a question requires you to bring together, and keep track of, many different information units: details given in the question statement, relevant concept ideas from your long-term memory, awareness of the ticking clock, and details from the ongoing solution process. It is as if the centerstage of our mind is fully occupied by 7 actors – the maximum this stage can hold – who are working together to create a successful play LIVE.
Now, if you suddenly start worrying about the consequences of NOT cracking this question, each such thought throws out one chunk of information that was relevant to the question; this is like an armed gangster roughly shoving one of the seven actors off stage at gunpoint to usurp his place.
The more the armed gangsters (G) who take the centerstage, the fewer are the actors (A) left there (because G + A = 7), and the less intelligent is the extempore play they can create. The more you worry, the less question-related information you can actually hold in your mind, and, therefore, the less likely you are to actually solve the question.
Can we prevent those gangsters from getting onstage? Can we avoid choking?
Yes, but most GRE students do not know this. The student I cited above has been preparing for the GRE for almost a year now and has taken multiple attempts at the test and has worked diligently at his quant and verbal prep putting in two hours or more on each weekday along with his busy day job. But, how much time has he put in to address his test anxiety?
Zero.
Most GRE students assume that improving their quant and verbal skills will automatically increase the confidence with which they face the test, but this is not always the case. As our skills go up, so does our goal score, and then, we convince ourselves that we absolutely cannot afford to not achieve this shiny new goal score, and thus starts a new cycle of test anxiety.
Most people think of no solution other than ‘subject matter mastery’ for their test anxiety; however, in truth, ‘subject matter mastery’ is a necessary but not sufficient condition to alleviate test anxiety.
If test anxiety persists despite good command of the subject, what should one do? That’s the answer I hope to provide through this two-part article series.
Many research studies have found that choking caused by performance anxiety can be effectively mitigated through writing interventions.
Expressive writing prevents choking.
To write about what is bothering you is called Expressive Writing.
Researchers Gerardo Ramirez and Sian L. Beilock have found that if before an exam, students prone to test anxiety write out for just 10 minutes the worries eddying in their head, they will score better.
One such laboratory study involved college students. Researchers first took a baseline math test (the pre-test) in which the participating students were simply asked to do their best. After this, they were informed that they would soon have to take a second test based on the same syllabus and of identical difficulty.
High-stakes condition were created for this second test as follows:
- The participants were put into pairs of two and a financial reward was announced for all pairs in which both partners got a high score in the second test; if only one of the two partners scored well, the pair would get no reward. Each student was privately informed that his partner had already taken the second test and had done quite well, and, therefore, his pair’s getting or losing the financial reward now depended solely on his own score; you can well imagine the performance pressure that would be created in a student’s mind by the fear of losing face in front of his partner and being held responsible for the pair’s loss.
- The students were also informed that their test attempt would be videotaped, and these recordings would be later viewed by their teachers and peers. This scenario is also well-known to increase performance pressure.
Now that all the students believed the second test to be a high-stakes event, half the students (the control group) were asked to sit quietly for 10 minutes, while the other half (the expressive writing group) were asked to describe their thoughts and feelings about the upcoming test. The students were sorted into the two groups such that the average pre-test score for both groups was identical.
Once these 10 minutes were over, the students took the second test (the post-test).
Thus, the study had these three consecutive stages:
- The pre-test
- ‘Expressive writing’ or ‘quiet sitting’ for 10 minutes
- The post-test
So, what did the researchers find?
The control group students had choked under pressure – their accuracy dropped 12% from the pre-test to the post-test – while the expressive writing group had improved their accuracy by 5% from the pre-test to the post-test.
Let’s take this in.
The difference in the accuracy between the two groups was of 17 percentage-points.
By referring to the accuracy to scaled score conversion tables shared on my website, you will realize that, in the GRE, a difference of almost 20 percentage-points in accuracy translates into a scaled score difference of:
- 6-9 points in verbal, depending on the average difficulty level of your two verbal sections.
- 5-7 points in quant, depending again on the average difficulty level of your two quant sections.
Let’s say that two students Xavier and Conor are equally – and highly – anxious about scoring well in the GRE and that the mock scores of both tend to hover around Q163, which indicates that they both have identical levels of quant ability.
Shortly before his GRE, Xavier uses expressive writing for 10 minutes, while Conor does nothing of the sort.
(Note: I’ve named the first student Xavier, because the initial of his name – X – stands for the ‘Expressive writing group’ in the aforementioned study; likewise, the second student is named Conor, because ‘C’ stands for the ‘Control group’ in the cited research study.)
As per the research study cited above, Conor’s accuracy in the GRE may drop by about 12% with respect to his mock performance, and so, he may only score about Q159 in the actual test, while Xavier’s accuracy may improve by about 5%, and so, he may bag a score of about Q164 in the test.
Though these students have the same level of quant ability, on the test day, Xavier may end up scoring almost 5 more points in quant than Conor!
That is a game-changing difference in scores, don’t you think? And this difference came about not because the two students fundamentally differed in their quant knowledge (they did not, at least not by much, as evidenced by their same score in the pre-test taken with an unstressed mind) but because one invested some time in an effective intervention to alleviate his performance anxiety, while the other did nothing.
So, if your GRE date is quite close, just do this one thing. Write down your worries, as descriptively as you can. This simple exercise will help you perform better in the test.
But if your test is still a few weeks or months away, then you can do even more, as I will lay out in the Part 2 of this article series.
References
For both the impact that performance anxiety has on performance (by competing for limited working memory capacity) and the research study cited in this article, refer to the below article published by Gerardo Ramirez and Sian L Beilock in Science 2011 Jan 14:
Writing about testing worries boosts exam performance in the classroom