<p>Have any of your children experienced performance anxiety that interferes with academic success? My daughter did very well in high school but is experiencing intermittent anxiety in college, especially around writing papers.</p>
<p>My D choked on final exams several times. She had been unlucky with scheduling-- with back to back tests/projects/papers piled on top of each other and little time to sleep/cram/work in-between. Stress seemed unbearable at times. She could handle the material. But she couldn’t handle the volume of work and multiple high stakes tests going on at the same time. Sad to see her blow grades she’d maintained all semester with a poor final performance, but no excuses. D graduated from college last year. She is a very smart/high aptitude kid who had a merit scholarship. She did not graduate with honors, though, and she was ashamed because most of her friends/peers did and assumed she would. I would say that exam stress/anxiety definitely interfered with her academic success. And this has led her to consider a completely different (but more suitable) career path than her original goal.
No real advice–just sharing my kid’s experience. Your kid is not alone–most students hate writing papers. What exactly about writing papers is causing your D anxiety? Perhaps remind her to pace herself/don’t procrastinate. Allow time for drafts and ask friends or prof to review paper before the final draft. Then she won’t feel so rushed and she’ll be more confident that the paper is good before she gets to the deadline.</p>
<p>I suffered from this throughout undergrad. I am in physics so I would always struggle to finish exams and would often be so nervous I wouldn’t be able to think clearly. This definitely affected my grades in the beginning but less so when I was an upperclassman and was able to perform more consistently. However, although this made my GPA significantly lower than people would expect (I assume many people think I have a really high GPA based on comments they have made), it did not stop me from getting into five top ten grad schools in theoretical physics including Stanford and Harvard with fellowships at two (including Harvard) for being one of the top 5-6 or so applicants. Since I did really outstanding research and got to know professors very well, they knew that I knew the material very well despite doing poorly on many exams and they probably wrote that in their recommendations.</p>
<p>So the message is that people for the most part realize that the difference between an A and a B can often have to do with how well you test versus what you know. And there are many other ways to show what you know. Another good thing for me was that several grad classes had take home exams, all of which I did very well on. And now apparently with my grad school curriculum I may never have to take an in class exam again…</p>
<p>This is not what I thought this thread was going to be about… ;)</p>
<p>Wasnt that just a topic on Reddit?</p>