If no one has ever told you this before, you are hearing it now: testing of all kinds not only depends on what you know and how well you can convey it, but also on how well you can do this under the psychological pressure you bring to be able to perform at that moment.

“To test” means “a procedure intended to establish the quality, performance, or reliability of something.”

Going back to music, sports, dance, and theater for a moment. When you practice, rehearse, and prepare, there is intrinsically no difference from being on stage, in the stadium, or at the recital – no one believes that you will have forgotten your knowledge and skills at the big event. But those big events are tests. From the big game to opening night of the show, you are being not only tested for how well you do, but also how you do under the psychological pressure you bring to be able to perform at that moment.

When you make a mistake during that testing event, it might mean you were not prepared, but it might also mean that you are experiencing some form of performance anxiety because of the pressure and expectations of that one-and-only-one-time-that-counts moment.

And no testing event is ever ideal or optimized. If the recital is scheduled for 7:30 PM on Saturday night and some highly distracting event happens at 6:30 PM, you generally have an obligation that you need to fulfill. The show, as they say, must go on. How you are able to perform in the face of some adversity is all a part of what it means to be able to perform and to fulfill you obligations. Is your performance guaranteed to be worse just because the setting is not ideal? Not at all! There is as much of a chance that it sharpens your senses and your awareness.

Sometimes you know you are well prepared, you have the confidence of past performance, and thanks to your practices, you know you are ready. And sometimes you just have a bad day. It happens.

For dealing with anxiety, if that is an issue, many of the same strategies you may have used for sports, music, dance or theater can work for academic testing.

(1) Visualization strategies: Dress rehearsal means going through all the motions in the setting. Go to the testing room. Bring a practice exam, decide where you want to sit and take a practice there.

(2) Ritual: Remarkably, ritual and lucky tokens work, psychologically, by giving us a tangible degree of control over our sense of readiness. From a favorite pair of socks to a preferred snack, from a run around the building to entering the room precisely 10 minutes prior to the start – all of these things work on setting the proper state of mind for the upcoming event. People in advance of sports or arts performances are some of the most ritualistic and superstitious individuals you ever see; good coaches and directors will go out of their way to make sure there are all sorts of readiness signals in place.

(3) Psychological compartmentalization: As you mature, you can develop the ability to keep conflicting cognitions from interfering with one another. We all differ in this ability. A distressing event from one part of your life can overwhelm all the others, or it can be psychologically walled off and not interfere until you are ready to deal with it. Compartmentalization can be a critical learned behavior. Physicians, for instance, learn to compartmentalize events (particularly in the case of trauma) so that they can take of their patients and address whatever the immediate issues might be.

Giving a presentation… treating a patient… teaching a class… these are all tests, performances of one’s skills under whatever life situation people finds themselves in the demands of the immediate moment. Understanding that academic testing (exams, papers, presentations) automatically includes performance issues is a critical understanding to have and to learn to work with.

Essay 1: You have autonomy
Essay 2: The learning skills you enter with
Essay 3: Post-COVID dialed up autonomy
Essay 4: Resources and their useful use
Essay 5: Practice explanation: Control over when you make errors
Essay 6: Testing: It’s called performance for a reason
Essay 7: Transformational Learning: Resistance is Futile
Essay 8: Grading: Scales are good; curves are bad.