Stress and anxiety, for many people, are integral components of their daily lives. In fact, anxiety is a necessary human response. In manageable doses, anxiety protects you from life’s dangers. You naturally feel anxious standing on a cliff and looking over the edge. In essence, your body is heightening your awareness of this potential threat and emphasizing that some action might be necessary to protect your well-being. The same is true with performance or test anxiety. When you are asked to perform, the tension produced from normal anxiety heightens your awareness of the situation and helps you to focus on the danger (i.e. task as hand). With this additional focus, you are more easily able to successfully complete your goal, whatever it may be.

For many people, however, this natural, beneficial anxiety response is superseded by an uncontrollable feeling of dread. When asked to prepare for and then take a test, individuals manufacture feelings of such importance about the test that they become overwhelmed by the anxiety associated with it. Symptoms of test anxiety affect both the body and the mind. Hearts race, hands become clammy, breathing grows labored, minds go blank. Worse still, test anxiety is a vicious cycle: worrying about the test causes increased anxiety, which causes increased worry about the test. As GMAT instructors, we have seen or heard of this response all-too-frequently with our students. Recently, a student who was consistently scoring between 35 and 40 on the quantitative section of her practice examinations score a 6 on her actual test. That’s right, she dropped from a score of approximately the 60th percentile to the 1st percentile. When asked what happened, she simply said, I panicked. She explained she just couldn’t understand the first problem, and from there her mind just went blank. For the remainder of the section, she was unable to organize her thoughts or regain her focus. Although this case is extreme, many students have allowed test anxiety to undermine their test taking abilities, resulting in scores that are well below their true abilities. This strategy series will focus on methods to control your test anxiety as you ready yourself for the test.

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Erica Lee (NY), Alex Cappy (DC/Phi), Robert Wilburn (NC) and Danielle Diciaccio (NY HQ)

The 3rd Annual Manhattan GMAT Instructor Convocation took place this past weekend. Dozens of Instructors came from across the country (and Canada) to mingle and share best practices with some of the brightest teaching minds anywhere.

The topic of the afternoon was how to deal with students whose issues are not primarily content-related (i.e. understanding GMAT-tested concepts), but rather issues surrounding the test-taking experience (e.g. stress management). Some very interesting themes came out of the Convocation – we’re going to be compiling some of these ideas to help our Instructors coach students moving forward.  Some good suggestions came up for us incorporate into our upcoming books.  We’re also looking at putting together a series of essays that may be helpful directly to students as well.  An essay will likely appear in this space.

The Convocation was then followed by a massive Company dinner and a party at the CEO’s apartment, so it wasn’t all work and no play.   Perhaps there will be more pictures to come . . .  🙂

The GMAT, like many things in life, is a stressful experience. We arrive and we’re handed a bunch of legal information that we have to read and sign. We have to empty our pockets and put everything in a locker, evoking feelings similar to going through airport security. A digital photo and a digital fingerprint or palm scan are taken. Every time we enter or leave the testing room, the digital fingerprint or palm scan is repeated. Oh, and then, the outcome of the next four hours could have a major impact on the success (or not…) of our business school applications.

It’s no wonder that, by the time the exam begins, we’re seriously jittery. But is there really anything we can do about that?

Carrie Shuchart, ManhattanGMAT instructor extraordinaire, thinks so and she recently wrote the article “Managing GMAT Stress: 7 Useful Tips” to share her great strategies with us (click on the title to read the article).

You may also be interested in this older article, “Stress Management,” which discusses some physical relaxation techniques that can help to reduce stress.