The Psychology of Exam Preparation

By Elmira Shririnsokhan

I have been preparing students for high-stakes English exams such as IELTS, Cambridge exams, TOEFL, and GMAT for 15 years and have been involved in writing assessment and speaking examinations for 3 years. I think exam success is not always about language proficiency or the ability to answer questions – other factors, many of them psychological, also play a role.

It’s certainly true that our students need to know the format of the exam they are preparing for. The teacher should direct their students towards task completion in the productive tasks, and should provide the corrective feedback necessary to ensure grammar and lexis are used with flexibility and control. In short, what we are already doing to help our students is a step in the right direction – but to go further, we need to do more. We need to consider the psychological preparation of our students, but to do that we need to think about the personalities in the room. From my time preparing students for exams, I’ve come across three broad personality types, and for each one I feel there is a path forward to ensure exam success.

1. The anxious high achievers

These learners are, on paper, the strongest. Their writing is logically organized, their vocabulary is appropriate and precise, and their grammar is well controlled. But such control sometimes comes at a high cost. During their speaking exams they have a fear of making mistakes that can paralyse performance. They self-monitor and correct constantly, apologizing for each and every error that slips through. Before they know it, all they’re communicating is their anxiety, not their carefully thought-out answer to the exam question. They become so focused on the mistake they think they just made that they stop paying attention to their speaking partner, and suddenly their responses lack authenticity – or even relevance. They receive a mark much lower than their high level of English would ever suggest.

Research on test anxiety suggests that anxiety consumes working memory resources (Eysenck et al., 2007). When we use our cognitive capacity to worry about our performance instead of using it to perform, we have fewer resources ready to process the language and construct our sentences.

How can we help these students? Do they need a boost to their self-confidence, reassurance from the teacher that they can succeed? No, anxious high achievers need something more. They need to be trained out of their current mindset, so that they learn not to be anxious in an exam setting.

Here is what I do:

• Imperfection tasks: all of us want to achieve a goal by doing a task but for anxious perfectionists like me this is the air we breathe. Introduce tasks that cannot be done perfectly, either by design or because of a time limit. The first time I introduce an imperfection task I make sure it’s not language-related. I want my students to see what we’re doing before we do it in the context of their exam. So, I might ask my students to draw a perfect circle – a nearly impossible feat without a pair of compasses. Or, I ask them to draw fifty circles in a minute. Some might manage this task, but then how good will the circles be? In the feedback stage, we consider how likely it was to ever complete these tasks perfectly, and whether getting the job done was worth the imperfections along the way (the idea here being – yes, absolutely!).
• Emotional regulation and briefing sessions: these can be very helpful to separate achievements from identity. Mistakes can happen and they do not define who we are and instead of thinking about what ifs, just focus on the task at hand and use the techniques and strategies from the classroom.
• Expectation management: an anxious high achiever is aiming for a perfect score in the exam. But striving for such perfection, especially in more open-ended productive tasks like speaking and writing, is a recipe for disaster if you suffer from the kind of anxiety I’ve been describing. Instead, I look with my students at the assessment frames. For Cambridge exams, everything relates to the level – a B2 student should pass the B2 exam, while a C1 student would be better off taking the C1 Advanced (an obvious point but worth bearing in mind if your students are taking the IELTS, a one-size-fits-all exam that can be the bane of the anxious high achiever). But you don’t need 100% to pass the paper – 60% will do. Look at the assessment frames, and highlight what the student needs to get the mark they want. Make that the target, not perfection.

2. The shortcut seekers

I’ve heard these students described as perfect – in the sense that they want to have passed the exam. They don’t really want to go through all the hard work of preparing – they will take any and all shortcuts to success. They look for templates, phrases to memorize and structures to impress the examiners. They want a Band 8 in IELTS even though they only have Band 6.5 abilities.

An anecdote related to me involved students learning the set expression “These two pictures are as different as chalk and cheese” for use in Part Two of the Cambridge B2 First Speaking paper. The catch? The pictures the student had to talk about were thematically related, and so the clever expression meant to garner more points for lexical range served the opposite purpose.

There is certainly a place for learning chunks of language, but there is no substitute for deeper learning.

Not everything is the fault of the student, it’s worth pointing out. Sometimes the student arrives with an artificial need for a particular band – perhaps their institution has decided that everyone needs B2 English, regardless of the usefulness of the language. Or perhaps the student has been misled by marketing – they’ve been promised a boost of a full IELTS Band in six short weeks, and think that this is achievable. Whatever made the student the way they are, we need to help.

Here is what I do:

• Exam strategy sessions: we work on what the exam expects them to do and then we talk about what tools they need to have in order to achieve the result. Knowing what is assessed in an exam can help this group to build an adaptable outline. It can also help warn the student not to use language that doesn’t fit – like in my chalk and cheese example. Knowing the exam is not cheating – it’s a necessary first step, and can help students take their learning more seriously.
• Expectation management: most students take some kind of placement test before starting a course. Show them their current level, look at the assessment frames for the next level up, and discuss with them how much work is involved in going from one to the next.

3. The plateau prisoners

Perhaps this one is the most psychologically complex one, a learner who has tried many different techniques and strategies but feels stuck at their current level. These test takers have taken the test more than once and do not know why they’re not getting better scores. They blame bad luck, unfair examiners, or difficult questions.

The plateau effect is very common in skill development and language learning. Research on deliberate practice (Ericsson, 2006) highlights that improvement requires targeted attention to specific weaknesses rather than repetition of familiar tasks. These learners should focus more on systematic error analysis – and on bringing in new language and new approaches. The challenging part for both teachers and students is not just a technical one but a psychological one.

Here is what I do:

• Error treatment: we work together to find the repeated patterns that affect their performance. Fossilised errors can account for a lot, but fixing them takes time.
• Micro skill focus: these students know the skills and techniques, but they usually lack the subskills needed for success. Take Communicative Achievement in the Cambridge exams – to score more than a passing grade, you need to include complex ideas (clearly articulated) instead of straightforward ideas. Many students don’t know what this means, and don’t know how to achieve it even when they do. Look at model texts; engage in deeper discussions in class. Consider opposites – if the task asks you to say what will happen in the case of X, also consider what would happen in the opposite scenario.
• Expectation management: sometimes the plateau prisoner expects success by doing the same thing again and again. Creating a road map for them to follow, with actionable milestones along the way, can help them see what they need to do to get further, and knowing this can help manage their expectations for themselves.

Psychological readiness and expectation management

Across all three profiles one principle remains the same: expectation management. We teach our students grammar, vocabulary, and techniques to answer the questions. But we also need to spend time discussing anxiety, perfectionism, brain fatigue, and cognitive load.

Psychological readiness and expectation management should be integral to exam preparation classes. Our tasks should prepare the students to perform in a realistic manner rather than to produce perfection. Students should reflect on their strengths and weaknesses with the help of those around them.

Final words

Students in exam classes often face significant external pressure: university admissions, professional development, immigration requirements, to name but a few. Exam preparation teachers have a dual role, not only teaching the language, but also managing the performance. Students need to know that exams do not only test their language ability – they also test how students think, react, interact, and regulate their emotions. If we neglect the psychological side of exam preparation, we’ll fail to help our anxious high achievers, shortcut seekers, and plateau prisoners.

References

Eysenck, M.W., Derakshan, N., Santos, R. and Calvo, M.G. (2007) ‘Anxiety and cognitive performance: Attentional control theory’, Emotion, 7(2), pp. 336–353.

Ericsson, K.A. (2006) ‘The influence of experience and deliberate practice on the development of superior expert performance’, in Ericsson, K.A., Charness, N., Feltovich, P.J. and Hoffman, R.R. (eds.) The Cambridge handbook of expertise and expert performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 683–703.

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