Over the years, students at all
levels of education have been confounded by an intimidating terror which comes
alive in them whenever a said examination is approaching. Many students have
been “victims” of this anxiety fright and the parents/guardians and instructors
of these students mostly misinterpret it as un-seriousness, negligence,
laziness and unpreparedness for the approaching examination which in fact, most
times, is untrue. Of course, I am not disputing the fact that there is the
place of laziness, negligence, and unpreparedness on the part of some students
who feel they can prepare for any examination any how they want or for some
unknown reasons, do not just feel concerned or interested about preparing for
the examination and when the examination date is close, that’s when they start
studying. Most of the times, these sets of students end up overwhelmed by the
bulkiness of the syllabus. Their case is different.
The indications of anxieties
range from tension, illness, to diverse forms of fear; fear of failing, fear of
not attaining a targeted grade (which is quite different from failing) and so
on. But in all, I have categorized these anxieties based on their time of
occurrence in students and I have proposed some steps to be taken in order to
overcome them.
1) Long-term anxiety: I refer to
this mode of anxiety as the one in which the student starts feeling bothered as
soon as the date of the exam is announced which is some cases might be 2-3
months before time. Take for example, JAMB UTME, the dates of the examination
is always announced at least two months before commencement. In the case of
WAEC, the time-table is always out long before the time the examination will
take place.
Students who fall in this
category become so frightful and so fearful that although they start studying
for the examination, the fright consumes and empties all they have studied and
it eventually turn out as though those students never opened a page of a book.
A student like this gets discouraged and ends up nursing the exam fright till
the period of the exam, in which the student will possibly fail.
To overcome long-term anxiety,
the victims must acknowledge they have this problem, as acknowledgement is the
first step to overcoming this problem. Having admitted the problem, the victims
must surround themselves with students who are confident and are not bothered
about studying for and writing an examination. Carefully observing how calm and
unnerved these students are in preparing for the exam will go a long way in
trivializing the examination magnificence in the affected student’s prospect.
The parents/guardians and instructors of the victims should also be informed in
order to also assist them. Stories of erstwhile affected long-term anxiety
victims, probably of parents/guardians and instructors, and how they subsided
it can be told.
2) Short-term anxiety: I define
this anxiety as one which becomes evident in victims when the examination is
about a week or few days away. Students who fall in this category do not feel
any form of anxiety initially, rather they start feeling nervous about the
examination when it is so close-by. This mostly occurs after having studied
conscientiously for the examination, they try out the past questions for the
different subjects and realize they can’t solve as many questions as they
thought they would be able to. Or in some cases, it might be that the student
took more than the required time to solve the questions. Shock comes in which
in turn introduces fear, worry and anxiety, which ultimately could nullify the preparedness and
the victim becomes discouraged about the exam and conclude it’s not worth it.
My proposition to overcoming
short-term anxiety is thereby to have familiarized oneself, while studying,
with the past questions so as not to be caught unawares by any difficult and
strange-looking questions one might encounter. It is advisable to have a group
of students with whom one discusses with and solve diverse ‘strange’ questions
with as this equips the victims against diverse difficult questions they might
encounter and quicker methods to even solve some questions in order to beat
time.
3) D-day anxiety: I describe this
anxiety as the type that occurs on the day of the examination, and more
specifically, while the examination is being written. This kind of anxiety can
affect the performance of a student greatly even after having prepared
assiduously for the exam. This occurs mostly when the victim encounters very
seemingly difficult and strange-looking questions at the beginning of the
question paper. Perhaps the student now attempts these questions and do not
find answers in the options, or the question takes a lot of the victims time; uneasiness
and anxiety creeps in, which may cause the victim to lose confidence and this in
turn might affect the expected performance of the student.
This can be overcome by realizing
that, unless otherwise stated, it is not compulsory to answer the questions
from top to bottom. It is therefore advisable to skip to much simpler questions
and what this does is that it boosts the students’ confidence to answering
questions, and the questions that seemed so difficult and strange might be later
solved as though it was even simpler than the simple questions.
On
a closing note, it should be noted that examination anxiety is not exclusive to
brilliant or dull students. Anybody can be a victim of this terror which can
affect the overall performance in an examination greatly. Therefore, all I’ve
tried to do in this piece, is expose you to time categories in which anxiety
could occur and I have correspondingly proposed the steps that can be taken in
order to curb it. I hope you were informed?
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