By this point in my life, I would say that I have easily taken at least one-thousand tests, and counting. As time goes on, I have learned how to manage the stress of tests and learn how to better prepare for them. However, since I have graduated from high school, I have been having difficulties with some professors. I feel that in college, they view you more as a face in a sea of people whereas in high school and below, they see you as a student that are trying to educate to have the best life possible and prepare you for college.
Like I have mentioned previously, having testing anxiety in college seem to be more of a challenge because not all professors see their students as a human being with needs. This semester, however, stands out the most to me the most because it is the most challenging for me. In the past, I have been able to talk to professors and ask them to do certain things on tests or quizzes and we would be able to work out something or they would give me tips on how I could prepare for the test or quiz. This semester, the professor does what is on the test, such as how many multiple choice and open ended there are and even when the test is going to be, based off of voting. The first time we did the voting for when the test was going to be, not all of the people voted so she just went with which one that had the most hands raised. So it was concluded off of this vote that we would have the test sooner than on the syllabus and we had to get the practice test in sooner. I was not happy about this because I work about 40 hours a week at a real job on top of this class, so that stressed me out, to begin with. I tried to brush it off and say it was no big deal that I could just push through it and get everything over with. Well, a week later we got the test back and I utterly failed it. I didn't fail by a couple percentage points, I very much so failed with a 37%. This gave me the worst feeling in the world and made me feel like a stupid student and gave me almost no hope for the class.
A couple of weeks went by and the professor brought up the upcoming test that was going to be taking place in a couple of weeks. This time we were voting on how many multiple choice and open ended there were going to be. We had not yet done the voting because the professor wanted to give us time to think over what we wanted. I took advantage of this and e-mailed them because I wanted to express my opinion. In my e-mail, I was basically stating how much the last test stressed me out and I was literally begging her to not add more open ended because I only had fifteen minutes to spare on the last test, and that was not enough time to complete any other open ended questions. I asked her if she could add more multiple choice questions so that way it would bring down the weight of each multiple choice question. A few hours later, they replied to my e-mail stating that I will have to convince my other classmates to vote for this. I almost lost it because I am paying my professor to run the class and do their job but no, it is up to the students to decide.
Well, the day of voting came sooner than later and my group of friends and I had convinced the class to only add an additional open-ended question and more multiple choice questions. This brought the weight of each question to only 1.5 points and because there was an additional open-ended, each question would have fewer parts and not weigh as much. In addition to this, the multiple choice would be 60% of the test grade and the open-ended would be 40%.I was okay with this solution because the weight of all the questions, open-ended and multiple-choice, was going to be less so that made me less stressed. However, at the end of voting, my friends and I had just rememberd that the professor words the multiple-choice questions in a way to trick us, which I don't think is fair because they should test us on our knowledge of the topic, not if we can beat the teacher at their own game.
So basically, after all, is said and done, having testing anxiety and a teacher that doesn't seem to care is extremely difficult and challenging. The only thing that can unfortunatly be done in a situation like this is to either stay with the class and try and work through it or just drop the class and take it with another proffesor the follwing smester.
