Experimenting on Smart Nerve Wreck Friends During Exams

During the trials (Which ends tomorrow, thank God.), I noticed a peculiar thing about a friend of mine. I realized that this thing happens during all the examination periods. He is a smart guy, and yet his worrying attitude doesn’t match his grades. We all have that kinda friend, right? I decided to experiment on my assumptions:

Aim: To determine the effects of the level of worry of a person on the grade of their exam results

Hypothesis: The more worried the person is, the higher the grade of the exam result

Variables:

Manipulated: The difficulty of the exams

Responding: The level of anxiety of the person

Fixed: The person

Apparatus and Materials:

• A human lab rat nerve wreck anxious friend
• A chair
• A table
• Exam papers (Three subjects based on friend’s skill)
• Pen
• Clock
• Malicious laugh track or any anxiety increasing device (Optional)
• Rope (Optional)

Procedure:

1. Place the human lab rat nervous wreck friend on a chair.
2. Push the chair to the table.
3. Place easy exam paper on the table.
4. Give the friend a pen and order instruct him/her to finish the test within the allotted time. Another subject person (Me) is needed to take the exam as well.
5. Wait for an hour or so.
6. Collect the exam paper, whether he/she is finished or not.
7. Observe the subject friend and record on table.
8. Mark the exam paper and record the grade on the table.
9. Repeat the experiment with medium-level and hard-level exam paper.

Precautions:

•         If the lab rat friend is unwilling, tie him/her to the chair on the rope.
•         If he/she does not display much anxiety during the exam, the laugh track/anxiety-increasing device is used.

Tabulation of Data:

Level of Exam	Anxiety Level (%)		Exam Grade (%)
	Me	Nervous Wreck Friend	Me	Nervous Wreck Friend
Easy	20	48	75	84
Medium	46	63	69	89
Hard	52	82	64	90

Conclusion:

The hypothesis is accepted.  The more worried the person is, the higher the grade of the exam result.

However, the hypothesis does not apply to the normal subject (Me).

  I’m sure all of you can relate to this. It's not easy having this type of person as a best friend. But hey, what's the point of being called a best friend if you can't put up with the downsides of people, right? :)

 Plus, it's fun to fool around with his anxiety. XD

Exam Time!

You have two more weeks left until your major exam, a gigantic pile of revision books left untouched since the last exam, waiting to be read, and your mother breathing at your neck, nagging at you to study. No problem, you say to her. Just after you completed Level 21 in the brand new computer game you bought the other day.

Time flies very fast, and eleven days later, you're panicking, reading through hundreds of text books like crazy, cursing at the game for making Level 21 too hard and for wasting your time. How are you supposed to cover every single subjects in three days? You start to calculate:

- There are 9 to 10 subjects

- In each subject, there's 'bout seven to ten chapters

- Your major exam covers everything for the past three years

- So, the minimal number of number of subjects would be:

9x7x3= 189 chapters to revise

You suddenly wake up in the middle of the room three hours later after you fainted, wasting potential study time.

Now, you're sitting in the exam room, cursing silently at the seating arrangement; the ones surrounding you are dimwits. The death sentence in the form of exam papers arrive. The timer is set. An hour and a half left. You pass through the first few questions with relative ease. Then the godawful hard question pounces at you. It was from the chapters you didn't have time to revise in detail. You try to pick at your brain for answers, but nothing would come. You try to read people's mind, and send SOS signals to their brains, but it fails. You try your supervision to take a look at their answer sheets, but is blocked by the teachers. You decided to just 'tembak' at the question. The same scenario happens at most of the questions that came after that. And probably 4 of the exams you encounter during exam week.

When exam week ends, you snuggle up in you duvet, making a mental note to leave Level 21 aside next time exam's nearing.

Good luck to all PMR students! :D I've been through the dreaded moment last year, so I know how it feels. So, I don't have to say how easy it is, 'cos you guys won't believe me. I'll let you lear the hard way. Relax~! :D