Since 2004, Nitin Sawhney has successfully used meditation and breathing exercises as a test anxiety solution. All the details in the story below are true. To protect privacy, the student’s name and biographical information have been changed.
Mariana and Test Anxiety
Mariana is a wonderfully warm, hardworking student, with a sparkling curiosity about the world and a strong desire to learn. Yet as I found a few weeks after we began working together, she often froze during important exams.
Over three months of preparation for the SAT, Mariana learned a test anxiety solution through a tutoring program coupled with mindfulness techniques. As a result, she opened up many college options for herself. Her SAT scores rose 420 points, and I learned in January that she will be attending an Ivy League university in the fall.
Mariana grew up abroad, spoke four languages (English was her fourth), and enjoyed reading, even in English. Mariana’s Junior PSAT scores were Reading 50, Math 54, Writing 54 (Total 158), suggesting a likely SAT score of 1580. After seeing her willingness to work hard and her interest in reading, I was confident that I would be able to help her raise this score by 300+ points.
Tackling Goals
During our first seven sessions, she made very strong progress in Math and Reading (the areas we worked on first), and was scoring in the 650-700 range on Reading and Math on self-proctored SATs taken at home. All was proceeding rapidly, even faster than I had envisioned.
Over spring break, Mariana was to visit colleges in the U.S., so we planned a few practice tests at our Bethesda office. On her first test, much to my surprise, she did terribly, scoring in the low to mid 500s on each section. I asked her to take another test a day later, and she did similarly. Puzzled, I asked her about the difference in scores between the sections taken at home and the tests proctored at our office, and she told me that this “always” happened to her, that she always did badly on longer exams and standardized tests.
In that session, I began working with Mariana on basic breathing exercises and mindfulness meditation. We started with 10 minutes on the first session and then did five minutes each for the next two or three sessions until she was meditating each morning as a habit. Her instructions were to start meditating for five minutes a day before school and then see if she could build it up to 10.
Timed Sections & Practice
Alongside this, she was to continue doing timed sections using the strategies I had taught her. The breathing and meditation helped Mariana relax and focus on each reading passage and understand better what she was reading (even during the pressure of a proctored test). By calming her thought processes, meditation also helped her focus better on Math problems. As she gained confidence in test sections, I asked her to take longer practice tests, and her scores gradually rose.
On the day of the actual June SAT, Mariana meditated in the morning and followed my pre-test instructions to the letter. She was careful, calm, and happily focused on each section, and performed to the best of her ability.
Then, on the fourth section of the test (a Reading section), the person sitting next to her raised his hand and, appearing very confused, informed the proctor that he had inadvertently skipped a section on the test and had bubbled in half the fifth section on the wrong area. As Mariana described it, the proctor, in the middle of a class of students, started yelling at this boy about how stupid he was. Then the proctor left the classroom, found the head of the school, and pulled him in. The head of the school started where the proctor had left off, castigating the poor child for his error, as Mariana and the other students in the room took their timed reading comprehension SAT section. I’ll repeat: timed, SAT, Reading, Comprehension.
Results
If you haven’t taken the SAT in a while, you might have a hard time appreciating how hard it is to do reading comprehension timed. Doing so while someone is talking (let alone shouting) is pretty much impossible, and as a result, Mariana lost a few important minutes on her SAT Reading section. Nevertheless, she composed herself and completed the test as best she could. Her scores on the June SAT were Reading 580; Math 670; Writing 640, for a total score of 1890, a 310 point improvement over her Junior PSAT. (Junior PSAT scores are meant to predict Spring SAT scores.)
Over three months of preparation, Mariana had learned to overcome debilitating, chronic test anxiety and a horrible testing situation. She had also opened up many college options for herself. What was remarkable, perhaps heroic, was the way Mariana was able to compose herself after that section. She’d had a bad testing experience in the past – on her March SAT, with fewer distractions, she had not done well. In June, however, she was the bodhisattva of standardized testing. Mentally, she told me, she laughed about the sheer absurdity of the situation and moved on.
In October of her senior year, Mariana retook the SAT and scored 610 on the Reading and 720 on Writing to raise her super score to 2000, up 420 SAT points from the 158 she had achieved less than a year ago on her Junior PSAT. Mariana was thrilled.
On our last meeting, she told me that she would continue to meditate as a test anxiety solution and would even practice whenever she felt stressed outside of school. At college next fall, I think she will have many occasions to use her learning.