In the education system, students are trained on how to take tests. Whether it’s studying, getting more sleep, or eating beforehand. In classes, students are “programed” into how a test should go and operate and if there is a malfunction, there’s nothing you can do about it.

As a student, sitting in a testing room, you can’t control what is going on in the operation of forming a test. This makes it impossible for students to show their true potential when they are constantly getting robbed of opportunities. How are students going to cross these barriers when they don’t even know that they exist? So how could this affect a student outside of the testing room?

Mental Health

A student’s mental health is affected by many things that aren’t just in the classroom. It could be classmates, sports, clubs, family, and them just beating themselves up. Every day someone is comparing themselves to someone else because they didn’t the 90% on that test, they didn’t score the touchdown, or clock in as many hours as they wanted to. Mentality is constantly being built and reformed. Little victories don’t matter and unless you can prove to yourself and other people that you are worth it, your mental constantly gets destroyed.

Family contributes because if you have bad relationships with your parents: the stress of the fight that morning, sorrow of losing someone, or anger that has just been built up to the top. This creates unnecessary stress on a student because now they are stressing and worrying about a situation that, in a way, is out of their control. You don’t know how your parents feel or what they are saying to other people. That section of time has been frozen and it won’t resume until you get home. Stress kills. It kills them because they are too worried about themselves to have to worry about class. In these situations, a student is now scared for their safety. Their heart is in their stomach and their mind is definitely not present in the classroom.

It especially gets destroyed when your teacher tries to prepare you for a test, but they end up leaving you in the dark. You put in so much time to study and work extra hard, and for what? Just to fail even more. When a student is testing it can cause stress, low self-esteem, and anxiety. This leads to bad test takers and students start second guessing themselves. This results in bad test scores and students just start to give up because all they see, is failure.

The Bigger Picture

Mental health of a student contributes to more than just what happens in the classroom. The feelings of stress and anxiety that school puts on a kid, can be carried to home and can even evolve into something more. These emotional feelings can turn into depression and even involve drug use. Students get into a place where they want to feel numb, so they become numb. Relationships with other people can be broken because they let stress get in the way of what they care about. Some students use stress to push through hard times, other students end up drowning in it.

Testing does not help. Testing creates an uninviting environment that turns into a nightmare the second you step into the classroom. The cold room, the blank walls. You can feel the anxiety coming off of the other students. All your confidence leaves your body and you’re left with a bare mind.

So, with this mental health in the education system…

…how will nationwide tests tap into that advantage with bias?