Handle exam stress with care

David took a deep, cleansing breath in an attempt to calm himself. It didn’t work, just like the many he had taken in the past. Nervous tears stung the back of his eyes... Now it wasn’t the time to create a scene, though. His pen clattered to the floor, his sweaty palms unable to keep a firm grip on his writing tool. A few of his pupils looked up from their papers, their heads shaking in obvious irritation that was cutting into the laser-like focus and precision they needed to ace their exams.
On this day, David’s nerves, his will and his determination slowly eroded and then shattered by exam anxiety. He had studied hard, really hard, for this paper, but try as he might to get coherent words out on the sheet in front of him, he just couldn’t. It was almost as if someone had smothered his brain with a really dense pillow. The tale of David may be fictional, but it is very much rooted in reality.
Over the next couple of weeks, tens of thousands of students all across the Sultanate of Oman will sit for their exams, the few short hours they spend putting pen to paper in auditoriums and examination halls probably playing a big role in deciding their future.
T weekly spoke to educators and child psychologists in Oman to find out how to deal with exam pressure.
Yes, exams must be given the importance they require, but there are some who place far too much importance on how an exam will dictate a child’s future. How a child does in an exam may for all we know be a guide for what he or she is capable of, and does not always determines the career path he wants to follow.
It’s like Aamir Khan’s character Ranchod Das ‘Rancho’ Chanchad said in the Bollywood movie 3 Idiots. “Do that work in which you are talented. If Lata Mangeshkar’s father had told her to become a fast bowler, or Sachin Tendulkar’s father had told him to become a singer, where would they be today?”
The reality is that how we fare in our exams does have a big impact on our careers, but how we fare in life does not solely depend on our exam results. Some do place an extreme emphasis on marks and results, but low-scoring marks do not necessarily equate with failure. That, however, does not mean students can afford to take their exams lightly.
Anuya Phule, a psychotherapist practising at Hatat Polyclinic in Muscat, spoke about dealing with exam stress.
“All the students experience anxiety because there is a good anxiety and there is a bad anxiety,” she explained. “This good anxiety helps us to perform well because it keeps us focused and it motivates us, prepares us and makes us alert. When this anxiety goes beyond the limits, where it affects our concentration, makes us moody, affects the bowels, and essentially makes the person in question unable to proceed with the task at hand, then you have bad anxiety.
“For children, exam anxiety may include things like a loss in concentration, there is moodiness, where the child feels irritated, his appetite is gone, there is irritable bowel syndrome, the task cannot be done then the child feels exam anxiety,” added Phule, as she listed the symptoms of exam anxiety. “Sometimes, while the child is in the exam hall, he may suffer blackouts or go completely blank. This is the number one symptom of exam anxiety. Parents also do have stress, but they sometimes tend to project their own anxiety onto the child, and this is definitely not good.
“Children feel this stress or anxiety because of pressure from parents, or because they think they are being put in a life-and-death situation. They feel that if they fail that one exam, they are failures. What parents can do is motivate the child to have an everyday study routine. The parent has to start putting a child in a routine, condition the child to study, and then prepare a timetable for the child at least a month before the exam. Sit down with the child, decide which subjects are important and maintain a routine. Avoid junk food, eat healthy, avoid video games, and any visual stimulants. This helps the mind to stay calm. The parents should also try to be calm and avoid projecting their anxieties onto the child.”
Exams are indeed pressurising for children across any age, but what worsens the conditions around exam anxiety are the added pressure that society and parents put on children to succeed. There is a tremendous burden on children to succeed in the competitive world that we live in, but adding to their stressors is not the answer. A passionate child who enjoys what he does will always do his job well, and that, says Phule, is what a parent must understand.
A child who is passionate about how an aircraft takes flight and stays airborne could one day end up working for Boeing or Airbus because he genuinely cares about engineering. Conversely, a child that is coerced into this subject will only do it because he is pressured into doing it, and that will one day break him down, as was the case with Steven Thomas.
“My mother was a mathematics professor, and she automatically assumed that I would take engineering,” said Steven (name changed). “I wouldn’t say I was bad at engineering, but it was just not something I wanted to do. I got into one of the best engineering colleges as well, but I just could not deal with committing myself to such a heavy, tedious academic course when I did not want to do it going forward.
“My mother and I had a big argument at home because she felt that engineering was the only way forward, it was as if that was the only choice available to me,” confided Steven. “In the end, things got quite bad between us, but I decided to drop out, and pursue a course in hospitality, because that is what I really want to do. A group of my friends and I decided to start a travel agency and that is what I do today. At the end of the day, your decisions are yours alone, and nobody else’s. If someone else wants you to live their dreams for them, that is their concern and not yours. You have to bear this burden, so don’t take it on in the first place.”
But despite the increase in pressure to perform and expectations to deliver, exam pressure is far from new. As early as 1994, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) commissioned a report to look into the negative effects of exam stress and anxiety. The choice of the topic was influenced by an increasing internationalisation of education in general and curriculum in particular that transcends national boundaries, and by a widespread interest in the relationship between curriculum development and examination systems.
As the interaction between the two appeared to have positive as well as negative effects, both reinforcing and inhibiting curriculum development, it seemed meaningful to examine the matter comparatively under different education and curriculum systems.
The report, which undertook case studies in seven nations – France, the US, Zimbabwe, Egypt, Colombia, Japan and Scotland – found that exam results were associated towards a more ‘market-oriented’ model of education, where students were being taught to meet the immediate needs of the country they lived in, instead of focusing on their development. With the exception of the African nations, this was particularly true among the other five. While such information did encourage schools to look carefully at the curriculum and examination preparation techniques, it could also encourage simplistic interpretation of what is essentially a very complex situation affected by factors beyond the control of teachers.
Eliott Wright, the Director of Pathway Programmes at Muscat University, says parents and teachers needed to encourage students to embrace studying for exams, rather than fear them.
“This stress may not necessarily be about exams, but about any upcoming assignment, coursework, submission or deadline you may have,” he explained. “I think the main reason is because from the students’ side, this may reflect a lack of planning or organisation. Here, we always tell students not to leave something until the last minute, though this may also be due to poor performances from the previous assessments. But I don’t want to just blame the students, because teachers have a responsibility towards making sure the students are well informed about when the exams are, so that the students can go away and study whatever is coming.
“Good guidance from the academic staff is necessary,” added Wright. “We just had a talk from a doctor at Sultan Qaboos University about the stresses that exam pressure may cause in terms of mental health, and she was saying that while this is widespread, there is little importance given to it. The problem is that quite often, the staff say it is only human nature to be stressed, and little anxiety may actually go a good way, but societal issues and cultural issues will always affect us. This is a fact of life, but there is a difference between telling students and children to do their best, and actually putting so much pressure on them that they give in to it.”
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But Dr Nutaila Al Kharousi, the founder of Al Harub Medical Center, said that in her experiences, students tended to procrastinate when they were faced with revising for their exams, and that was one of the main causes behind exam anxiety.
Nutaila said that stress sometimes could be a good thing as students became motivated to study and prepare for them.Stress was only natural, and students were not the only ones who suffered from it. Stress, however, turns into a problem when it becomes ongoing and prolonged.
“The sympathetic branch in your body is on high alert and adrenaline rushes in, causing symptoms such as, a sense of losing control, exhaustion, loss of sleep, anxiety, depression, forgetfulness, a lot of worry and a sense of being overwhelmed,” she explained. “Preparation is key. Not procrastinating with your studies until the last minute and reaching out and speaking to a mentor can help you. Time management and working through your caseload can benefit you.
“Also, understand your physiological responses to stress and how your parasympathetic system works,” added Al Kharousi. “What can aid your physical symptoms of stress is fixing into your schedule mindfulness, physical activities, yoga, breathing techniques and meditation. These practices all help with reducing symptoms of stress. Addressing stress at an earlier stage is essential because the long -term effects can lead to many serious problems such as anxiety and mood disorders.”
T weekly was also able to reach out to Dr Baby Sam Saamuel, the Chairman of the Board of Directors of Indian Schools in the Sultanate of Oman. Like Dr Al Kharousi, he too said that the practice of cramming – last minute preparations to make up for not studying in advance – was far from the ideal solution. In fact, mugging up answers and mechanically reproducing them on an exam paper were far from the ideal way of prepping for such an important day in their lives.
“It is an understood fact that the preparations for examinations should begin much earlier,” he explained. “Preferably, from the first day of lessons itself. Nevertheless, it is also easier said than done. However, cramming is certainly not the answer. The practice of last minute cramming, as common as it might be, only helps to absorb a limited amount of information over a limited period of time. Anything learned in such a manner gets forgotten just as easily as soon examinations are over.
“For a longer term retention and recall, it makes more sense to learn over a longer period, in smaller chunks,” added Saamuel. “This also gives time and scope for more sessions of active recall practice rather than revision practice. Active recall involves trying to recollect the data, making our brain work harder to recollect and thus retain that information. Examples of this could include self-administered tests, using flash cards or even making notes with books closed. The idea is that if we repeatedly try to practice recalling, we get better at remembering. If students practice this every day early on in the term, the amount of lessons they need to ‘study’ per day will seem less of a burden.” – [email protected]

T Weekly’ spoke to students (names changed) who will be sitting for their exams to get their perspective on how exam stress was affecting their studies, and how they dealt with it.
Arjun (aged 15) – I have always loved studying so for me, exams have never really been a point of concern. A lot of my friends ask me how I can handle this, but the truth is that I don’t really know. I want to become a scientist when I grow up and I know what I have to do for that to happen.
Simon (Aged 12) – I love cars and I want to do automobile engineering. But I don’t like studying for my exams because I like seeing how the cars work. Sometimes, I will take apart my toys to see how they run. My mother keeps shouting at me and asks me to study, and also because the toys are expensive
Diana (aged 16) – Both my parents are working and I have a brother to take care of, so studying can be difficult. I want to study so that when I grow up, I have the means to properly take care of my family. Sometimes, when I have to take my brother for his guitar lessons, I take a textbook and study while he is at class.
Amina (aged 10) – Many of my family members are now coming up to me and telling me that these exams are really important, but I really wish they would not. I am trying to study and it is not easy with everyone reminding me about how hard it is going to be. I enjoy studying but when other people keep telling me this, it can get uncomfortable.
Sufiyan (aged 13) – I am the middle child in my family, and my parents keep coming to check up on me every few minutes when I am studying. It is almost like they don’t trust me enough to ensure that I am studying. I know how important this is, so I will continue to study.
Reshma (aged 11) – My tuition teacher gives me extra homework so that I will become good, but we already get homework from school and my parents give me sample question papers so that I will be prepared for the exam, but it’s too much. I cannot say no to them because if I don’t do my tuition homework, my teacher gets angry.