Close your eyes and picture this scenario for a moment. You’ve dedicated huge chunks of your junior year to prepping for the ACT or SAT. On top of your honors and AP classes, and your leadership positions in various athletic, artistic, and volunteer extracurriculars, you’ve ALSO had to find time in your schedule for weekly standardized test tutoring sessions and related studying.
You’ve hammered down your Math Etiquette, Algebra, Geometry, and Algebra 2, perfected your grammar chops, learned to pace the Reading and Science sections, and maybe even practiced Vocab in Context or Evidence questions.
You’ve learned to juggle all of these disparate types of learning, took practice tests, then took mock tests, and finally on test day…you STILL bombed.
Perhaps you were taking the ACT. Everything was going as planned until you opened up the Reading section and just could not for the life of you comprehend the double passage about the suffrage movement and its significance—at least, you think that’s what it was about. This Social Science passage ate up more time than the 8:45 you were supposed to spend on it, so you had to guess on the last 5 questions of the section. Your confidence in tatters, you entered the Science section feeling like a giant ball of anxiety, and forgot to practice your Page Turn Zen to calm down. You couldn’t stay focused here, either. Half of your attention still stuck on the suffragettes, you all but gave up towards the end, guessing on several questions in this section as well.
Or perhaps you were taking the SAT. You’d been feeling sick to your stomach all morning (stress? or was it that third helping of pancakes?). You had no choice but to bolt in the middle of the No-Calculator Math section, race to the restroom, and spend eight minutes there. There goes your section! And unfortunately, there goes your Math score.
While both of these seem like test nightmares—and they are—the universe can sometimes be cruel in its timing. Perhaps an aunt passes away the night before the test. Or gallstones start to make their presence known in the middle of the ACT Math section (this actually happened to one of my students!). Or you wake up and feel the telltale sore throat of COVID.
Or maybe you’re perfectly fine physically and emotionally, but you just happen to draw a “bad test”—you get stuck with a Reading or Science or English section that just doesn’t click for you. One unlucky passage ruins the whole test for you: your low score in the section gets averaged with your other amazing scores…leaving you with the exact same composite score as last time. (Womp womp.)
In short, even if we do everything we “should” to get ourselves to the gold on test day, sometimes stuff happens.
While the thought of a random curveball is enough to make some students say, “Then what’s the point, anyway?” and throw in the towel, YOU, my friend, are NOT like those students. You understand two important things that they do not:
1) Though there are some things you just can’t control on Test Day, there are MORE things that you can.
You are the master of how much effort you put in. If you know the test inside out and get a curveball thrown to you, imagine how much worse it would have been if you DIDN’T know the concepts and THEN had an emergency? Make sure you’ve fully prepared.
You are the master of (most of) your well-being and mindset. Did you get enough sleep and eat a good breakfast before the test? Did you leave yourself enough time to shower, do a warm-up question set, and get to the testing center with lots of time to spare….or were you sprinting all the way to your little plastic seat (and putting yourself into a scattered headspace as a result)? Did you do a Power Pose before entering the test room? Did you indulge negative thoughts of “who cares?”…or instead consciously opt for optimistic mantras like “I’ve got this! I’ve learned everything I need to know for this exam”? A good mindset goes a very long way, even under shoddy conditions.
2) Flubbing one test is NOT the end of the world.
First of all, both the ACT and the SAT permit Score Choice (meaning you get to pick which test sitting to send colleges, so they never see that one crappy score you got). And—even better—more and more colleges are beginning to Super Score. That means they use only your highest performance on each test section to calculate your ultimate score, even if you earned them on different test dates.
These days, most students take the SAT or ACT two or three times. And since you hopefully factored multiple test dates into your Testing Timeline, you’re allowed to have a meltdown on one of those dates. Happens to the best of us.
But wait! What if catastrophe happens to strike EVERY SINGLE TIME I sit for the test?
I actually had one student like this: it was one medical emergency after the other for her. In the end, though, she still improved several ACT points over time, because neither hell nor high water could undo the incredible work she had put in throughout the year. And with Super Scoring, she got her 32. While we both knew she was capable of attaining a 34—and had done so in several mock tests—that was just not in the cards with her physical health. In the end, she still locked in about 70% of the gains she had made. Now THAT’S a success story.
If this is you, remember that you did the very best you could, given the circumstances. That’s all you CAN do, anyway, right? Emergencies of this type strike very, very rarely—but learning stress management and perspective are forever!
CONCLUSION
And speaking of learning to manage stress: if you’d like a bunch more concrete tips on how to do that, sign up to work with me. Every year, I tutor students who are struggling with test-day anxiety when they first walk through my doors….and by the time we’re done working together, they are cool, calm and collected when it’s time to start filling in bubbles.
OR, if private tutoring doesn’t fit your budget or study style, never fear! My online course is perfect for you:
This is a totally digital, totally self-directed video class that will help you slay the dragon of your test anxiety. I walk you through over a DOZEN tricks and strategies for keeping calm and testing on. So if you liked the calming reframes that today’s post had to offer, just imagine the kind of score you can achieve with loads MORE of them!
