I Blank Entirely During Tests And I’m Not Even That Bad At The Material
Let me tell you about my botany midterm last October. I’d spent three nights camped out on the couch in my dorm’s common room, color-coding flashcards for all the different photosynthesis pathways, quizzing myself while I ate cold ramen, badgering my roommate to test me on C3 vs C4 while we watched that bad reality dating show she likes. I could explain it to you while half-asleep, walking to class, even when I’d had two beers at the party the night before. But ten minutes into that midterm, I turned to question 4, the 10-point short answer that asked to compare the two pathways, and… nothing. It was like someone had reached into my brain and sponged out every single word I’d ever learned about plants. All I could think was that the floor of the lecture hall smelled like old lemon wax and my water bottle was sweating through the napkin I’d wrapped it in, and the girl sitting next to me just shifted her paper away from my line of sight like I was staring on purpose to cheat. I wasn’t. I was just staring. I couldn’t have told you my own social security number at that point, let alone the difference between two plant chemical pathways.
This isn’t a new thing. The first time I remember it happening was 8th grade algebra. I’d sat at my kitchen table with my mom for two hours the night before, working through every practice problem at the end of the chapter. I got every single one right. I remember my mom high-fived me and said I’d aced it for sure. I walked into class that next morning, sat down, flipped the test over, and the first question asked me to write an equation in slope-intercept form. I stared at that blank line for five minutes, and I couldn’t remember what any of the letters stood for. Y? What was y? Why was there an m? I bit my eraser until pink rubber dust was all over my thumb and my notebook paper, and when Mrs. Henderson walked by and asked if I needed help, I just shook my head because I couldn’t even get words out. I ended up with a 62 on that test. That’s still the first test grade I think of when I wake up panicking about school in the middle of the night.
People always say “oh, it’s test anxiety, just breathe” like it’s that simple. And sure, I get a little nervous before big tests, but half the time it doesn’t even feel like nervousness beforehand. I’ll feel fine, I’ll walk in, I’ll answer the first three questions easy, and then boom—blank. It’s weird how selective it is. I can remember every lyric to the Hannah Montana soundtrack I had on my iPod Touch in 2008, I can remember that my childhood dog hated peanut butter but loved cheese puffs, I can remember the order of all 12 episodes of the first season of my favorite show, but ask me to recite a list of amendments I memorized last week on a test and suddenly I can’t even remember how many amendments there are. Last month I took a stupid mandatory work training test for my barista job (don’t ask, corporate makes us do it every year) and I blanked on the question asking what temperature we’re supposed to steam the oat milk to. I steam oat milk 20 times a day. I know that temperature by heart. But sitting there staring at that multiple choice screen, I had no clue. I guessed wrong.
I’ve picked up a few little tricks over the years, I guess. I used to sit there and squeeze my brain until my forehead hurt, trying to force the answer to come back, and that just makes it worse. Now I just skip it. I circle the question, I move on to the next one, and I do all the easy stuff I know first. It works about half the time. Once I’ve gotten five or six questions out of the way, my brain seems to unclench a little, and the answer I forgot will pop back in, like it was just hanging out in the back waiting for me to stop staring at it. The other half of the time? I leave the test, I’m walking to my car, fumbling for my keys, and all the answers hit me one by one, clear as day. I stood in the parking lot after that botany midterm listing all the differences between C3 and C4 out loud to myself, like I was proving I knew it to the empty cars around me. I even ran into my professor by the water fountain right after, and I blurted out “I knew that answer I just forgot it” and he just smiled and nodded like he hears that at least three times a day, which I guess he does. I wanted to climb into the drain and disappear.
The best trick I’ve found, actually, is writing down all the formulas or dates or key terms I crammed the night before on the back of the test page the second I get it, before I even read the first question. That way, if I blank halfway through, I can just turn it around and check, instead of panicking. It’s cut my blanking time down by a lot, but it still doesn’t stop it from happening. It happened last week, actually, on a pop quiz in my night class for the teaching certification I’m working on. The question was “what’s the first step you take when setting up your classroom for the day?” I student teach four days a week. I do this step every single morning. I’ve written two papers about why this step matters for building rapport with kids. But I stared at that blank line for a full minute, and all I could think was “is it take attendance? Is it write the agenda on the board? Did I completely forget the whole framework we learned last month?” I ended up writing “greet students at the door” which is the right answer, but I spent the rest of the quiz convinced I’d gotten it wrong, gnawing on my pencil eraser like I did in 8th grade. I go through a whole pack of replacement erasers for my mechanical pencil every semester, just from this stupid habit.
I don’t have a big neat conclusion here. I still don’t know why my brain does this. I’ve read the little articles about fight or flight response shutting down memory retrieval, that makes sense on paper, but it still feels dumb. I still get grades lower than I should because I blank out on 10-point questions I know the answer to. I still leave tests feeling like an idiot, even when I know I studied enough. It’s just one of those weird annoying things my body does, like how I sneeze three times every time I walk out into bright sun. It’s not going away, I don’t think. I just have to work around it, one chewed eraser and one skipped question at a time. Some days that’s enough, some days it’s not. That’s just how it goes.
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