By Michael Johnson

The beads of sweat coalesce on your forehead and your heart is pounding an SOS in your chest.  Surely, there must be a fire in the building or an approaching tornado.  No, it’s just another standardized test.

These common school situations induce terror in some students while others breeze through test days with an air of aplomb.  Junior Carlos Lopez is one of the latter. “When I know I’m about to take a test, I get mentally focused like I do when I am at practice.”

It turns out that there is a biological basis for how we react to the stress of something like a test.  According to a recent feature by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman in the New York Times Magazine, those who clear stress hormones rapidly don’t get overwhelmed.  Like Lopez, they become energized and focused.  Junior Marlena Jones gets “really jittery” before standardized tests.  She may be one who clears the stress hormone less quickly.

Under usual circumstances, people with slower clearance are better at reasoning, concentrating, solving problems, and planning.  With stress, however, they may crump.  As junior Jasmine Conkin says, “People get nervous and forget what they learned.” The fast clearance people are more laid-back, even though they can rise to the challenge under pressure.

Luckily we are not purely victims of our genes.  Both training and attitude can affect performance under stress.  Preparation and repeated challenges help those with slower clearance shine when the going gets tough.

Similarly, according to research by Jeremy Jamieson, a social psychologist at the University of Rochester, an assurance such as “people who feel anxious during a test may actually do better” can improve test results.  This reminder that those stress hormones can be beneficial had lasting positive effects on test scores.

Thus, those among us who sense doom when tests loom need to prepare well, take practice tests, and remember that those butterflies are the body’s way of pumping up for the challenge.  The laid-back types need to study, too.  Confidence and feeling revved only go so far.  You can pull the answers from your memory but not from thin air.