How to Deal With Exam Stress?

Quick point; I'm referring to mocks that don't hold any weight; if they offer you some kind of predicted grade that holds value, feel free to read the next section.

The beginning of exam stress starts with mocks and exam practice. The first thing we need to realise is that there are two main reasons why we get stressed. The first is just the atmosphere; in general I would reccommend asking your institution to have a change of room if you think it affects your performance. The second is more important, you can get stressed because a bad grade in your mock indicates you're not ready for the real thing. However, I propose an ammendment to that perspective.

If you are stressed during your mock or your practice papers, your grade, quite obviously, will not be very good. However, as a result, the grade you've gotten is just bad data, because it's been skewed by your stress. As a result, to prevent that skew, you need to omit any external factors; what we call 'control variables' if you aren't familiar with STEM terms. The only thing you want to know is, "How well can I do this paper under time?". This is easier said than done of course, but doing it isn't quite as difficult as it seems. Adopt the mentality of, "Here's the time. Here's the paper. I must do the questions on this paper in this time." (not for me, but if you find it helps, repeat this mantra before you start).

Quite literally, you're doing an impression of being a computer; you have the paper as an input, and the time as a parameter, and you just output the result, nothing else. The result may be that you are quite robotic when you do the paper, but hey, if it works, it works. As a result you will get A*s and there will be milk and honey and- no. That's not the aim of adopting the perspective, and that's (although not certainly) not going to be the case. What you want as an immediate outcome, is good data. A practice paper or mock is your chance to be your own examiner. You want to know how good you are. You can hope you did well of course, but our immediate want is for your data to be sound, and the grade to be an accurate reflection of your ability.

I would hope that the slight improvement to your grades (but again not your actual ability) in your practice papers would give a confidence boost. If not, try this:

Now things have spiced up; our reasons for stress have changed; we're now stressed because the outcome of this exam will have degree of consequence to your future. Like I said, I'm not going to downplay it's significance because I neither know nor care what exam you are doing, I'm just going to assume it's important. So how do we adopt this perspective? Simple, we do the same as before. Adopt the scientist, robot, computer person. But this time we change our reasons, or more specifically, we identify that although the consequences of your future are contingent on your grades, your grades are contingent on your ability. It seems obvious, sure, but it's best to spell it out when adopting this perspective*.

This perspective helps because what we need to do, as an immediate aim, is to work efficiently. And what we have found is that, when adopting the perspective in our mock and practice papers, the input/output answers over time is what optimises our ability (note that even if you aren't working at the capacity you want; at this point this is the best you can do, so just hope you get lucky). If we deviate from it, we can either do better than our ability, or worse (and let's be honest, it's probably going to be worse). So in order to optimise our marks on our paper, we need to omit any external, again, 'control variables', which include stress. It's also worth noting at this point, that stress impeding your ability during exam usually comes in the form as a distraction (i.e how much weight have you put in for each question). As a result, this is a variable that needs to be omitted.

To sum it up in a patronising tone, "Do what you did in the mocks."

*I believe this is because the robotic way of spelling things out gets you in the mode of adopting a robotic way of thinking.

Just as a side note, it's worth noting that stress occurs more often as you near the end of the paper. As a result you may find that if you have issues with timing, it may be a good idea to limit how much you can look at the clock; focus on trying to go reasonably fast (and look at the clock at most 2-3 times). As a result, the weight caused by stress may outweigh the loss caused by being less able to time yourself during the paper; at least in my papers, this certainly was the case.