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Self-Growth
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Without question I am a better student today then I was when I entered university three years ago. However, when I started the self-growth project I felt there was still one major academic area with room for improvement and so I decided to change the way I studied for and wrote exams. During a three-week period filled with midterms, I implemented a plan and experimented with several strategies that were directed towards limiting stress, anxiety and nervousness during the exam period. A brief description of my reasoning behind selecting test taking as my area of improvement will be explained. Likewise, the overview of my plan and my strategies, the refinements I made to each strategy, my response to interview question written by Terry Orlick, and my completed planning forms, will also be detailed. Success as a student is related to commitment, dedication, and enjoyment but everything comes down to the empirical characteristic, grades. Students need good grades to continue their education. Academic success is vital to be able to reach my ultimate goal of studying medicine. I decided to choose test-taking skills as my area of improvement because I wanted to develop a plan to limit my anxiety and nervousness during an exam period. Anxiety affects my attention and I often make careless mistakes on test that easily could have been avoided had I remained calm. My plan to improve my test-taking skills concentrated on 3 issues that I have always recognized as areas for improvement but never really had the motivation for critical assessment. The personal self-growth project provided the motivation to assess these areas and as a result I developed several initial conclusions. First, when I study, time is not a variable and I can take all the time in the world to answer a question. What often happens is that I become distracted and my mind wonders but I still end up answering the question. During an exam, time is an important variable and there is no time for distracting thoughts. Every time my mind wonders during an exam I get anxious because I am aware that I have time constrictions. This leads to a positive feedback loop where anxiety causes more distracting thoughts and distracting thoughts lead to more anxiety. My strategy to help fight my battle against the positive feedback loop of anxiety was to implement a time variable during my study periods. The second area of attention was to change the way I wrote an exam. Before my self-growth plan my strategy towards test taking was to go through an exam very quickly skipping questions that required in depth thought and I only answered the easy questions. I would then go over the test a second time to answer the hard questions. My reasoning was that if I eliminated all the easy questions I could manage my time more efficiently between the hard questions. In my first midterm I implemented my first strategy described in the above paragraph but continued with my pre-self-growth test taking method. When I receive the midterm back I looked it over and I noticed that the questions that I skipped the first time through because I labeled them as hard where in fact not so hard. Some of the questions I labeled as easy were done incorrectly because I did not take the time to really think about what the questions were asking. Instead of improving my time management, what was in fact happening was that I was not thoroughly reading through the questions as I was trying to rush. This caused several problems. The more questions labeled hard the more anxious I became. Questions labeled easy were sometimes not easy and were often answered incorrectly. My second strategy that I implemented during my second midterm was to slow down. I read through every question twice and took the time to really think about what the questions were asking. Results to the implementation of my second strategy will be discussed in more detail later in the paper. My third strategy was also linked to my study habits. In my pre-self-growth project study method I learned visually by reading over my textbook and my notes and highlighting important material. By learning this way I very rarely wrote my thoughts down on paper. For example, if a professor handed out practice questions I would look at the questions and answer them in my head. However, when it came time for an exam and I was required to write my thoughts down I would often draw a blank.
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