Scientists and researchers found that most children perform better outside examination halls. And they attribute poor performance to three main causes:

• Test anxiety
• pressure of time
• fear of unknown

Test Anxiety

Almost everyone feels nervous or experiences some anxiety when faced with a test or an exam. In fact, it is unusual to find a student who doesn’t approach a test without a degree of anxiety. Many students experience some nervousness or apprehension before, during, or even after an exam. It is perfectly natural to feel some anxiety when preparing for and taking a test.

Too much anxiety about a test is commonly referred to as test anxiety. Test anxiety is very common among students! It can interfere with their studying, and may cause difficulty in learning and remembering what they need to know for the test.

Further, too much anxiety may block performance. It may result in difficulty to demonstrate their real knowledge during the test.

Test anxiety can cause a host of problems in students. Although each person will experience a different collection of symptoms with differing degrees of intensity, the symptoms fall into a few categories.

Physical – headaches, nausea or diarrhea, extreme body temperature changes, excessive sweating, shortness of breath, light-headedness or fainting, rapid heart-beat, and/or dry mouth.

Emotional – excessive feelings of fear, disappointment, anger, depression, uncontrollable crying or laughing, feelings of helplessness

Behavioral – fidgeting, pacing, avoidance, substance abuse

Cognitive – racing thoughts, ‘going blank’, difficulty concentrating, negative self-talk, feelings of dread, comparing to others, difficulty organizing thoughts.

Stressful emotions can inhibit a student’s ability to absorb, retain and recall information. Anxiety creates a kind of “noise” in the brain that blocks the ability to retrieve what’s stored in memory and also greatly impairs the ability to comprehend and reason.

Research has shown that providing students with tools and strategies that build both emotional skills and healthy physical habits when preparing for a test can help them overcome test anxiety and the associated symptoms, while improving their ability to prepare for and perform on critical testing.

Pressure of time

All exams are time bound. Students have to attempt all the questions (correctly) in that fixed duration. The time is allotted so that most average students can attempt the questions well within the allotted time (35 questions in 60 minutes for SOF Olympiads). Although there are no extra marks to complete the test in less time than allotted, but still the human brain tends to feel the pressure to complete the test as fast as possible. The degree of feeling the pressure / urgency may vary with different students. But thankfully, the degree of this feeling can be minimized by our system introduced below.

Lack of Test-Sophistication

Test sophistication (or test-wiseness) is the ability to use the formats of the test and the test-taking situation to obtain a higher score. Students who are not test-savvy may well be at a disadvantage. Most students today are accustomed to multiple-choice tests but not in separate OMR answer sheets, and penciling in ovals. This can result in poor performance even by otherwise brilliant students.

Both of the factors mentioned above combine together give rise to the fear of committing an error which can be be aggravated severely by the lack of test sophistication. This sense of discomfort with the “new” system and lack of time can unsettle the brain sometimes and can result in stupid errors like filling in the wrong bubble, filling answer for the wrong question, missing the answer line completely and causing confusion during filling the answers. All these factors aggravate each other thereby resulting in loss of confidence and performance and increase in rate of errors.

Your child can be the victim of the symptoms mentioned above and may perform poorly well below his/her true potential.

Thankfully, all these problems can be eliminated largely to a great extent by following our easy to use system. The Olympiad Skill Development System helps you not only resolve these problems to a great extent but goes far beyond.