The weight of test performance puts pressure on DHS student body

PHOTO: McKenna NNgan/HUB photo illusstration

By McKenna Ngan

BlueDevilHUB.com Staff–

Student anxiety increases when teachers give more weight to high-stakes tests, especially with more difficult courses.

“It’s too much,” sophomore Chloe Jang said. “If you are good in general in class but a bad test taker, it can totally ruin your grade and even though you work hard on classwork and homework, it does not help with making up for your mistakes from the test.”

In-class tests are meant to evaluate what people know and don’t know. This way, individuals can understand what areas they need to improve upon. 

But the increase of anxiety from the high stakes of doing well on a test hinders some students from doing their absolute best.

Counselor Kimberly Liu describes anxiety as a spectrum. 

People categorized in the middle “are your average (who experience) the average amount of stress: kind of worried, wanting to do well on the test and feeling a little bit of nerves about this, and that’s maybe where a lot of students lie,” Liu said. 

Then there’s the extremes, where one student may not feel any sort of nervousness or anxiety and the other experiences concerningly high levels of stress.

 “Their mind might go blank, so that they’re unable to process information, they’re unable to perform on a test or complete a test,” Liu said. “Sometimes they might experience what we might call sort of a ‘panic state’ and these may apply to more extreme cases of anxiety.”

Some teachers at Davis High dislike putting so much emphasis on tests.

“I think having 95% of a student’s grade based on tests is a bad idea,” English teacher Stephen Giorgi said. “I firmly believe that there can be multiple modes of expression in regard to knowledge. Tests are one way and they don’t work well for everyone.” 

This situation especially affects those who experience major test anxiety. “The constant feeling of extreme anxiety is almost normal,” sophomore Michelle Nguyen said.

One of the main reasons students get tense from highly weighted test grading is that it’ll harm their GPA. With a low grade point average, acceptances to college gets more difficult. “[Tests] can affect a lot in the future and your chances of what you want to pursue,” Nguyen said. 

With tests making up the majority of student’s grades and knowing stacks of assignments having no effect, the uneasiness increases as it negatively impacts them from doing to their utmost potential. 

“Since classwork and homework don’t count much towards your grade, people tend to not do them,” Jang said.

Students hope for a change on how teachers set up the grading in the near future. “I wish it was 40% assignments, 60% tests and assessments, or 30%/70%,” Nguyen said. “(I) believe other provided work should also have an impact towards your grade.”