Relieving test stress

Students suffering from exam anxiety may now have a remedy. Researchers at the University of Chicago found that if students spend 10 minutes writing about their worries before the test, their scores rise by as much as 15 per cent. Psychology professor Sian Beilock and graduate student Gerardo Ramirez, divided 20 university students into three groups. One group wrote about their feelings, another wrote what happened to them the day before, and the third just waited for the exam to start. The students who wrote about their worries saw their grades jump from a B- to a B+. "We essentially got rid of this relationship between test anxiety and performance," Beilock said. The study is to be published Friday in the journal Science.