Exam nerves: what to do before and during the test

Exam nerves don't go away completely, and that's fine. What you can do is stop them from taking over: walk in having practiced without your notes, rehearse the exam before the exam, and have one plan for the morning and another for the moment your mind goes blank. Do that, and nerves stop freezing you and start keeping you sharp.

I've been taking exams in computer engineering for five years, and my hands still shake a little when the papers get handed out. The difference from first year is that now I know which part of that is normal and which part I can turn down myself, with specific things I do in the days before.

Here's what works for me, with an example from outside my major so you can see it applies to anyone: an intro Statistics midterm, the kind almost every business, health and social science student has to take, with probability problems and the normal distribution.

Why you get nervous (and why a little is good)

Nerves are your body reacting to something that matters to it: your heart speeds up, you breathe faster, your stomach tightens. It's the same activation that helps you react quickly, and in moderate doses it helps you focus. Trouble starts when it climbs too high.

When nerves run high, two things happen that are worth knowing about:

• Your head fills up. Thoughts like "this is going to go badly" take up the same working memory you need to solve a problem. That's why someone who knows the material gets stuck on something that came easily at home.
• Recall gets harder. Stress makes it harder to pull out what you learned, especially if you learned it in a fragile way, by reading and rereading.

The good news is in that second point: some ways of studying leave memories sturdier, and those hold up better under pressure. That's where everything starts.

What calms you most: practicing without looking

A lot of people try to calm down with relaxation tricks on the morning of the exam. They help, but they come late. The thing that lowers nerves the most happens a week earlier: knowing you've already answered those questions without notes.

When you study by rereading, the feeling of "I know this" is misleading: the text looks familiar, but you never checked whether you can produce it on your own. That doubt is fuel for anxiety. If you practiced with active recall instead (closing your notes and trying to answer, explain or solve), you walk in knowing what you know and what you don't. There's research suggesting that material learned this way holds up better under stress than material learned by rereading. I go deeper into it in the post on active recall.

For the Statistics midterm, that looks like this:

1. List the problem types. Conditional probability, binomial distribution, standard normal, confidence intervals. Four or five types, not forty separate problems.
2. Solve one of each without looking. With the calculator and the table you're allowed to bring, and nothing else.
3. Flag the ones that didn't work. Those are what's worth studying, not the ones you can already do.
4. Come back to them two days later. If they work now, the doubt that was making you anxious is gone, settled by evidence instead of pep talks.

The days before: rehearse the exam

Nerves feed on the unknown: whether you'll have enough time, how the questions will be worded, what happens if you don't get the first one. The more of that you know ahead of time, the less is left for your imagination.

• Do a timed practice run. Find a past paper for the course and work through it in the real time limit, at a desk, with your phone in another room. The first one is scary; the second one is routine.
• Decide your order in advance. For example: read everything first, then start with the problem I know best. Having that decision made saves you from making it with your heart racing.
• Write down what's worrying you. Spend ten minutes before studying, or before the exam, writing what you're worried about and why. Studies have found that writing about test anxiety right before a test can make it interfere less during the test: the worry lands on the page and stops crowding your head.
• Protect your sleep all week. Not just the night before. Running short on sleep makes everything feel more threatening, the exam included.

The night before and the morning of

The night before isn't for learning what you missed. It's for reviewing what keeps slipping, getting everything ready and sleeping. I wrote a full post on what to do the night before an exam, and the short version is: stop early, pack your bag (calculator with fresh batteries, ID, pencils, water) and mute the class group chat.

On the morning of the exam:

• Eat something, even if it's small. It's hard when your stomach is in knots, but going two or three hours on nothing doesn't help.
• Arrive early, but not too early. Cutting it close adds stress; showing up an hour early leaves you listening to everyone quiz each other on things you skipped. Fifteen or twenty minutes ahead is usually about right.
• Don't cram in the hallway. What you didn't know last night you won't learn outside the room, and hallway chatter is where nerves spread fastest. Put your headphones on or look at your own summary sheet, not someone else's.
• Relabel what you're feeling. The racing heart of anxiety and the racing heart of excitement feel almost the same. Telling yourself "I'm amped up, and that'll help me focus" instead of "I need to calm down" has some research behind it, and it works better for me than trying to feel nothing.

During the exam: when your mind goes blank

You get the paper, read the first question, and nothing comes. It happens to everyone at some point. What matters is having a plan for that minute, because you can't come up with plans while you're panicking.

1. Breathe slowly, with the exhale longer than the inhale. Say four seconds in and six out, three or four times. A slow exhale is one of the simplest ways to bring your body's activation down.
2. Read the whole exam before writing. There's almost always something you know, and seeing it changes your mood.
3. Start with what you know. In Statistics, maybe the binomial problem before the confidence interval. One solved problem early loosens the nerves for the rest.
4. Write something on the blank question. The given values, the formula you think applies, a quick sketch. Memory often comes back from one loose thread, and writing that thread down pulls the rest along.
5. Check the clock once per section, not every minute. Divide the time by the number of problems at the start and only look again when you finish each one.

If it's an oral exam, the logic is the same but out loud: asking for a second to organize your answer is allowed, and it beats starting to talk with no direction.

Practice that doesn't feel like a test

Part of exam anxiety comes from linking every question to a grade. That's why it helps me to practice in a format that doesn't grade anything: answer, get it wrong, see why, and none of it counts.

If you study from your professor's lecture slides, Filmina, a web app that explains your slides out loud, has a mode called Practice: you pick how much time you have and it builds questions from what it explained to you, adjusting to how you're doing. Before you see whether you got it right, you say how sure you were, and what you got right while unsure comes back sooner, which is exactly the stuff that makes you nervous. It doesn't replace a timed practice run or past papers, but it gets you to those practice runs with the theory already practiced.

When it's more than nerves

Everything above is for ordinary exam nerves, the kind that show up before any test and fade once you start writing. If your anxiety makes you skip exams, keeps you from sleeping for days, brings on panic attacks or has you thinking about dropping out, that's not something study techniques will fix. Most colleges have a counseling center or student mental health service, and talking to a professional is the most useful thing you can do. It isn't overreacting: it's taking it seriously.

Frequently asked questions

How do I calm my nerves before an exam?

Breathe slowly with a longer exhale than inhale, read the whole exam before you start and begin with what you know best. Most of the calm, though, is built earlier: practicing without notes and doing a timed practice run.

Is it normal to be nervous before an exam?

Yes, almost everyone is, and a little nervousness helps you focus. It becomes a problem when it freezes you, keeps you from sleeping or makes you avoid exams; in that case it's worth talking to a professional.

What should I do if my mind goes blank during an exam?

Don't keep staring at the question: breathe, move to one you know and come back later. Writing down the given values or the formula you think applies often gets your memory moving again.

How do I stop being nervous for an oral exam?

Rehearse out loud with someone who asks you questions like the professor would. During the exam, taking a few seconds to organize your answer before speaking is fine and usually goes better than answering on the spot.