When I take a test, my mind often becomes blank and I cannot concentrate or think properly. Either I am unable to write anything down, or I begin to write gibberish/nonsense and have to constantly erase incorrect things.
I especially realized this when I was taking the APCS exam today. I am the best student in the class and my average for the all the past AP exams that we did in class was 98%. I got a perfect on all the in-class FRQ’s except an 8/9 for one. I’m basically acing the test. Compsci and math in general just aren’t difficult for me compared other subjects like history.
Yet when I sat down for the FRQs, I started freaking out and couldn’t think straight. I would write random stuff that doesn’t even make any sense. For example, I’d write ArrayList n = new Rectangle (m.length). That’s a terrible example but basically I was writing completing syntaxically incorrect stuff and then be like “tf am I writing”.
Because my skills are solid, I can usually still plow through and force myself to eventually get most of the problems. But it’s extremely difficult and I perform quite a bit worse than normal. For one of the FRQs I couldn’t think logically enough and the code that I wrote was very lengthy and didn’t actually cover all the possible cases. 2 minutes after I walked out of the exam room, I realized a really simple way I could have written the code. Now, I don’t know if I got a 4 or a 5 on an exam that I should have been able to solidly get a 5 on. I talked to my other friends and while everyone gets a bit nervous on exams, no one had this level of anxiety.
Does anyone have similar experiences or advice on how to deal with this?