I was never good at taking exams. I can't be the only one who feels that way; it seems like we hear this a lot from ex-students after they leave school, as if we all learn this one thing about ourselves but only after we're set free from the one place in our lives that seems to operate almost entirely on structured examination.
It's like that favourite adage of high school maths teachers - you know the one: "You'll use this every day out there in the real world". And then we all go out into that real world and, I don't know about you, but I'm still waiting for the call from the Prime Minister declaring there's an international emergency that can only be solved if I can calculate the area under a parabola.
Exams are a bit like that. We spend a few years convinced that a big, cavernous exam hall is the only place where we can effectively show that we have learnt something - armed only with our 2B pencil with an eraser on the end - and then we leave that world behind and almost immediately realise how kind of bonkers the whole exercise was.
When was the time after school or university when someone came kicking in the door to tell us that there was a life-threatening emergency that required us to remember who the Treasurer was - and no, you can't look it up online!
I had taken engineering studies in my senior high school years along with a host of other very grown-up-sounding scientific classes, in almost all of which I consistently failed to shine. The idea was that, eventually, this writer phase would wear off ('It wasn't a phase, mum!' *proceeds to moodily sing Panic at the Disco lyrics*), and I would grow up and go and get a real job.
The only problem was that I was pretty rubbish at anything my loving, long-suffering mum and I considered "real jobs."
I wasn't a bad student. For the most part, I coped reasonably well in the classroom. But when it came to exam week, everything I had learnt suddenly became a foreign language, and my 2B pencil spent more time standing on the eraser end than on the pointy one until the whole enterprise felt doomed to hopeless defeat.
I remember one engineering studies exam in particular, in which I had scored less than a stellar mark mostly because an inexplicable brain melt had happened and I couldn't bring myself to answer a relatively simple question that was worth a healthy sum of points. My teacher was understandably exasperated. I was, too. All I had to do was sketch an object from another angle and, boom, done - but for some reason, it all just went a bit pear-shaped.
Something about that exam hall had a hex on me. Or, as was probably the more likely case, I was never meant to be an engineer and you can thank me later for all the structurally questionable Topics-Truss bridges that I never designed, and that you never had to drive on, and that, therefore, never collapsed under the weight of a light breeze.
I decided to take one for the team and became a journo instead (you're welcome, Earth), and went about becoming famous for not building astonishingly catastrophic bridges.
I had assumed that would be the end of it, until I got an email this week.
It seems that a pair of distinguished psychology experts have determined through a study of over 15,000 university students across three Australian campuses that students tend to score poorly on exams when they take the test in a big study hall with a high ceiling than when they test in a different environment.
Isabella Bower and Jaclyn Broadbent, respectively from the University of South Australia and Deakin, published their findings in the Journal of Environmental Psychology and concluded that there was a link between the environment in which students took their exams and the scores that they posted.
In non-scientific terms, the room really is the thing. Curses are real, and I could have had a job building bridges this whole time. Or, at least, that's my self-vindicating takeaway, but maybe read that with a grain of salt. I am, after all, still in my writer phase (I got your picture, I'm coming with you, Dear Maria count me in...).
The researchers note that they are now looking to gain further data from the real world, particularly given the advent of online examination. Initial findings suggest that the physical environment impacts student test scores, leading Drs Bower and Broadbent to consider whether the traditional exam hall is really the best place for our brains to perform.
"Exams date back more than 1300 years and are still one of the most common forms of assessment for school and university," the researchers wrote in their study for The Conversation.
"The key point is that large rooms with high ceilings seem to disadvantage students, and we need to understand what brain mechanisms are at play and whether this affects all students to the same degree," Dr Bower said.
The researchers say that their findings will help not only students facing exams but also encourage better design of the buildings in which we live and work so we can perform to the best of our ability.
We can only hope that the people making those designs have real jobs and aren't former journos emboldened by the comfort of a low-hanging ceiling. But, we live and learn.
