The Roman philosopher Seneca is often credited with saying: “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.”
As I learned during a long career of test taking, luck has little to do with exam success. Seneca was right — it’s all about practice and preparation.
While I may or may not have been proficient at thoroughly grasping every aspect of course content to be tested, I certainly became comfortable with and adept at taking tests.
In fact, learning and taking tests turned out to be two different skills.
High school in New South Wales in the ’60s was a test-happy environment that required sitting for the state-wide primary final grade 7 exams, intermediate exams in the third year of high school and then statewide leaving certificate exams in fifth year.
Looking back, I realize that we did little else during that final fifth year than prepare for finals in every subject by practising on past test papers in every subject.
The result was that when test days arrived, sitting for the tests was just more of the same.
Following high school were tests of every purpose and duration — finals in every subject of a three-year undergraduate degree at Sydney University, tests in every subject of a fourth-year teacher-training program at Sydney Teachers’ College.
By that time, taking tests and sitting for exams was simply part of life and held very little fear for me.
In B.C. schools in 2023, kids in grades 4 and 7 sit for the province-wide foundation skills assessment every year, and then the Grade 10 literacy assessment, the Grade 10 numeracy assessment and eventually the Grade 12 graduation literacy assessment.
The bottom line to all this is that we probably should devise a series of “How To Prepare For a Test” short courses beginning at the Grade 4 level.
This course could be administered at various stages up to Grade 12 and beyond to infinity or the end of testing life, whichever comes first.
I’m serious.
In the absence of any kind of a specific “test prep” course, teachers have an extremely significant role in helping students to overcome “test anxiety” that can negatively affect test performance and subsequently produce a skewed result.
Test anxiety becomes a problem when students’ cognitive skills are “short-circuited by the worry,” said Dr. Ellen Utley, a psychiatrist and advisor at the JED Foundation, a non-profit that focuses on suicide prevention and young people’s emotional health.
“High anxiety can impair students’ performance by impacting the executive function skills that enable them to focus attention and access memory,” Utley says.
Executive functions in the classroom and especially in test-taking situations control and regulate behaviours like paying attention, remembering information, and planning and organizing time and materials — all while watching the clock in a room full of other kids who are scribbling furiously on their test papers.
A recommended plan that can support learners in preparing for tests and assessments of various kinds should include at least two test-preparation necessities.
The first involves familiarity. When the structure of the assessment is familiar, i.e. the way test items are formatted, students are not panicked by the unfamiliarity of a test’s design.
That involves making sure students are comfortable with both the intention of the assessment and the layout used, which may be different from the school-based tests to which they have become accustomed.
The second necessity is the use of practice tests in simulated, preferably unfamiliar, testing environments — the school gym or cafeteria, for example.
Practice tests remove students’ fear of the unknown and make it easier to face the test without feeling overwhelmed. When there is too much stress, sometimes associated with an unfamiliar wording of assessment questions, some students shut down.
This leads to a more serious problem with obtaining legitimate results from large-scale province-wide assessments, even the FSA.
The assessments themselves are usually less specific while being broad in scope. Students expecting to be tested on specific skills and knowledge with which they are comfortable are less likely to be able to show what they know when they do not recognize the intention of a test question.
As Winston Churchill famously said, regarding his own difficulties with exams: “I should have liked to be asked to say what I knew. They always tried to ask what I did not know. When I would have willingly displayed my knowledge, they sought to expose my ignorance. This sort of treatment had only one result: I did not do well in examinations.”
Geoff Johnson is a former superintendent of schools.
