Testing is back. In response to widespread student use of AI for homework, many teachers have shifted grading toward in-class exams. Many colleges have reversed their pandemic-era retreat from the SAT and ACT. The return of high-stakes exams raises a familiar fear for students, parents, and teachers: that anxiety will make minds go blank and test scores collapse.
As psychologists who study and treat test anxiety, we have reassuring news. Students can feel anxious during tests and still show what they know. Test anxiety is a far weaker predictor of performance than most people assume. A bigger problem lies in what students do to avoid feeling anxious when they study. Spoiler alert: They don’t study very well. And then their grades reflect this.
Hundreds of studies bear this out. An analysis of studies spanning 30 years found that while highly anxious students score somewhat lower on average, the relationship is modest. The more revealing question is why there’s any relationship at all between anxiety and test performance. People often assume that anxiety hurts scores by blocking students’ access to their knowledge during testing. But research suggests this isn’t the case, and that anxious students’ difficulties begin well before entering the exam room.
In a 2022 study that tracked 309 medical students through months of preparation for a license exam, anxious students earned slightly lower test scores. But once researchers accounted for students’ knowledge before the exam, test anxiety no longer predicted test scores. More anxious students had simply gained less knowledge during preparation.
If test-day pressure dragged scores down, removing that pressure would boost scores. But a classic 1962 study found that it doesn’t. Students performed the same on SAT sections that counted toward official scores as they did on optional sections that they knew didn’t count. Whether a test counts for everything or for nothing, students bring the same knowledge and preparation into the room, and the same scores come out.
One reason anxiety can interfere with preparation is that studying well means confronting gaps in one’s knowledge, and that’s uncomfortable. So anxious students often procrastinate and gravitate toward less stressful study methods, such as re-reading notes, highlighting passages, or reviewing a chatbot’s summary. As the material begins to feel familiar, students develop a false sense of mastery. They avoid the study strategy that works best but can be the most anxiety-inducing: closing the books and testing themselves. A recent series of studies confirmed that test anxiety reduces students’ use of self-testing and completion of practice problems. This inhibits learning and leads to worse grades.
Consider the difference between reading a math problem in a textbook that shows the work and the answer versus solving a similar problem on a blank page. When the full solution is in view, each step of it seems intuitive. The student feels that they understand the logic fully and is confident they’re ready to solve this kind of problem on an exam. But once the solution is out of view, and the student has to decide where to begin and what to do next, the difference between recognizing an explanation and producing one becomes obvious. To prepare well for tests, nothing substitutes for doing, rather than viewing, the work.
Test anxiety is a far weaker predictor of performance than most people assume.
Educators and parents can unintentionally exacerbate test-anxious students’ preference for less effective study methods. Telling an anxious student “Just calm down, and you’ll do fine” implies that relaxation is required for performance.
Students who believe this may grow more fearful of anxiety symptoms and back further away from the very practice that would prepare them the most: buckling down. Providing formal accommodations for anxiety can reinforce the same misconception. For students whose anxiety is the only disability condition, extra time for tests implies that they can perform only when less stressed.
In our clinical work, we teach the opposite lesson—that students can function when anxious—by borrowing from the treatment of panic disorder. For example, we have students run in place until their hearts are pounding and their breath is short, then sit down and solve math problems. They discover that they can feel like they’re falling apart and still solve for x.
Teachers won’t be asking students to run in place before a quiz, but they can communicate the same message by treating a racing heart as a normal response to a hard task rather than a signal to stop. Research published in Nature found that reframing stress responses as helpful, rather than as a sign that something is wrong, improved high school students’ academic performance and well-being.
So our advice to students is simple, and teachers are well-positioned to deliver it:
First, treat anxiety as a cue to start studying, not to put it off.
Second, once material feels familiar, close the books and attempt to pull newly learned material from memory by explaining key concepts to a friend or solving problems unassisted. Then check your answers, correct mistakes, and return to any material you struggled with. Teachers can help students build this habit by setting aside class time for closed-book practice and feedback. Difficulty during practice gives students a map of what needs strengthening before the exam itself.
Third, take full-length, timed practice tests. AI tools can be remarkably helpful when used to generate practice tests, rather than to bypass assignments.
High-stakes tests reward knowledge, not serenity, and the top-scoring students are rarely the calmest. They’re the ones who’ve spent study sessions pushing through the discomfort of getting things wrong, until they get them right. Anxiety won’t erase students’ knowledge on testing day, but avoidance of anxiety can prevent that knowledge from forming in the first place.
