Executive Assessment Test Anxiety: How to Deal with It

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If you’re taking the Executive Assessment (EA), you have many years of leadership and management experience under your belt. You can make executive-level presentations, assess complex situations, and communicate your vision to others. But it’s likely that you haven’t taken a standardized exam in many years. It’s also very likely that you haven’t done many algebra problems or answered multiple-choice Reading Comprehension questions in a long time. So it’s no surprise that you might be apprehensive about having Executive Assessment test-day anxiety. Knowing how to deal with anxiety before a test is an important skill.

A little bit of test-day anxiety is natural and expected for nearly anyone. However, too much test day anxiety is likely to interfere with your concentration and affect your EA performance. If you are a student who tends to get stressed or anxious while taking tests, keep reading! In this article, we’ll look at some powerful strategies to deal with EA anxiety and perform at your best.

Here are the topics we’ll cover:

• Symptoms of Test Anxiety
• The Fight-or-Flight Response
  • Fight-or-Flight and the EA
• Strategies for Reducing EA Test Anxiety
  1. Be Prepared
  2. Take Practice EA Tests
  3. Visualize Your Success
  4. Practice Exposure Therapy
  5. Recognize Anxiety in Your Life
  6. Strategy 6: Transform Negative Attitudes
     • Negative Attitudes
     • Positive Self-Talk
  7. Transform Anxiety Into Excitement
  8. Find Your Mantra
  9. Be Aware of Your Breathing
  10. Stem the Anxiety Tide by Getting Busy Answering Questions
  11. Quit Focusing on Perfection!
  12. Leverage the Compound Effect
  13. Have a Backup Plan
  14. Hydrate!
• Summary
• What’s Next?

Let’s start by answering a common question: “What are the symptoms of test anxiety?”

Symptoms of Test Anxiety

Test anxiety can affect both the mind and body in many ways. Some common signs and symptoms include:

• Your mind goes blank during the test.
• The questions don’t make sense, even when you read and reread them.
• You have racing thoughts and feel unfocused.
• Concentration is difficult.
• You’re worried about your performance.
• Your heart is racing and your breathing is faster than normal.
• You feel anxious.
• You feel lightheaded.
• You’re sweating.
• You have cramps.
• Your mouth is dry.

If you’ve had all or some of these symptoms during the EA (or while taking a practice exam), you may have experienced test anxiety.

Let’s look at what causes these symptoms.

The Fight-or-Flight Response

A bit of anxiety is healthy, as it is the normal physiological response to a potentially harmful situation. Anxiety increases our awareness level, our visual and auditory acuity, and our processing abilities. However, as our anxiety increases, we can experience an abrupt drop in our performance. We call this drop in performance the fight-or-flight response.

During the fight-or-flight response, our bodies either fight a threat or escape from it. Several physiological processes ready us to fight or flee. Digestion shuts off. Pupils dilate, temporarily enhancing our vision. Glucose and stress hormone levels rise, providing energy to our muscles. Blood leaves certain parts of the brain that focus on higher-level thought, allowing that blood to flood the muscles, heart, and lungs, thus preparing the body for a physical confrontation.

The fight-or-flight response likely served us well in our distant past, during an encounter with a bear or a rival tribe, but it often isn’t the needed response in modern times. If you’ve said something in anger and then later regretted it, your outburst was probably the result of the decreased cognitive functions that accompany the fight-or-flight response.

Fight-or-Flight and the EA

If your anxiety level is too high when you’re taking the EA, your fight-or-flight response may activate and make focusing on the problem at hand difficult. The last thing you need is for blood to leave your brain to be available to your muscles. While this is a useful reaction if you’re facing a cougar, it’s not so useful if you need to set up an equation!

You want to maximize your EA score, and a big way to do this is to take the necessary steps to minimize exam-related stress and mitigate any anxiety that arises on the big day.

Let’s look at some simple yet effective strategies that all EA students can follow to help decrease their performance anxiety and increase their scores.

Strategies for Reducing EA Test Anxiety

Strategy 1: Be Prepared

The better you know the material being tested, the less stressed you’ll be on test day. This is the most logical and obvious strategy for minimizing EA test day anxiety. Consider a 21-question math test on basic arithmetic. Most people would not be nervous about answering basic arithmetic questions. Why? Generally, they’re well-prepared to tackle questions involving basic operations.

Now, change those 21 math questions to ones involving quadratic equations, exponents, rates, and probability, and now, they become a little nervous. Why? Well, they know that they are not so strong with those types of questions. They may not be prepared to effectively handle the challenges. Stress is the result.

So, what to do? Study, study, study! Then, after you have finished studying, study some more. There is nothing better for overcoming test anxiety than to be so prepared that they can’t ask a question for which you are ill-prepared. Here is a good preparation strategy: don’t practice until you can get questions right; instead, practice so much that you can’t get them wrong.

Once you know that you are ready for the EA, the test won’t be that anxiety-provoking. It may even be enjoyable! After all, you’ll be able to confidently show the test what you’re made of!

There is nothing better for overcoming test anxiety than to be so prepared that they can’t ask a question for which you are ill-prepared.

Next, let’s look at how taking practice tests can increase our comfort level.

Strategy 2: Take Practice EA Tests

There is a saying in sports: “you won’t play any better than you practice.” In other words, if you don’t give it your all during practice, don’t expect to perform well on game day. The EA is no different. Too many students do a lot of EA studying but fail to take enough practice tests. This is a losing strategy. Even if you know the material well, you have to take practice tests to simulate test day.

Taking (and reviewing) all EA sample questions and official practice tests is an excellent way to reduce test anxiety because you build comfort and familiarity with the EA that you can’t get from doing practice problems during your EA preparation. When you take full-length practice tests under realistic testing conditions, test day won’t be so daunting. Of course, you need to space out your practice tests, in order to get the greatest benefit from them.

Next, let’s discuss how to use visualization to reduce test anxiety.

Strategy 3: Visualize Your Success

It’s a well-known fact that battles are won or lost in the time leading up to the battle. Often, people mistakenly believe that winning or losing depends on the battle itself. Of course, preparation and practice are important, but if you don’t believe in your success, you could be sabotaging yourself. Visualize yourself being successful. Visualize yourself answering questions on the EA correctly and earning a great score. You must feel it and believe it.

Many top performers, from athletes to Jeopardy contestants, use visualization to gain an edge. The human brain is an amazing organ, and we often underestimate the huge role that thoughts play in our performance. Remember that your thoughts become your actions. If you are confident that you can’t lose, you’ll be able to perform at your best.

Every day, for 15 minutes, work on visualizing your success. Just sit quietly for 5 minutes, 3 times a day, and think positive thoughts. You might visualize:

• Little bots placing necessary EA knowledge in your brain.
• Remembering every detail from today’s study session.
• Knowing your study material deeply
• Nailing every question you encounter on test day.
• Being relaxed and feeling positive during the EA.
• Leaving the test center with a great EA score in hand.
• Knowing that your EMBA application includes a great EA score.

Another technique to reduce or overcome exam stress is called exposure therapy.

Strategy 4: Practice Exposure Therapy

Exposure therapy involves putting yourself in situations that trigger fear or anxiety, thus creating an opportunity to practice responding differently. For example, a person who is afraid of heights would spend some time in high places, learning to manage that response.

Interestingly, even just visualizing being in a situation that triggers anxiety or fear can produce almost the same response that being in that situation does. So, to learn to stay calm while taking the EA, you can imagine that you are taking the EA. You’ll probably experience some of the fight-or-flight responses we previously discussed. But now you can manage them. Slow your breathing, close your eyes, and use some positive self-talk. Visualize a calm test-taking environment. Your body can’t experience anxiety symptoms indefinitely; soon they will decrease, and you’ll be in control.

The basic idea of exposure therapy is to face anxiety-producing situations until you don’t respond that way any longer. As you’re practicing, don’t try to repress anxiety. Rather, be aware of how you are responding to it and stay with any anxiety until you calm down.

Limiting anxiety in all areas of your life can help your EA performance.

Strategy 5: Recognize Anxiety in Your Life

If you’re the type who tends to get anxious and stressed throughout the day, it may be difficult to walk into the test center calmly. After all, every day you’re training your body to be on edge.

If you allow yourself to get flustered by every little life glitch, you’re going to have a tough time on test day. Therefore, being calm each day is your strategy. There are strategies you can employ to be cool under fire. For example:

• Be more patient with those around you. Don’t get rattled by small annoyances such as a disagreement with a coworker or a friend being late for lunch. Make a conscious effort to react calmly, and recognize that doing so will probably help the situation.
• Practice being comfortable sitting in traffic. What good does getting annoyed do? Stressing out won’t get you to your destination any quicker. Do the same for delayed flights and long lines at the gas station — just be calm.
• Practice being patient with yourself during the study process. If you miss a question, don’t agonize; use it as a learning experience.
• Realize that the situations stressing you out are relatively minor, compared to what you could face. Remember the quote from Helen Keller: “I cried because I had no shoes until I met a man who had no feet.”

You should also seek to transform your negative thoughts related to the EA.

Strategy 6: Transform Negative Attitudes 

Often, it’s the way we view difficulties in life, not the difficulties themselves, that give us problems. It’s well-known that students who experience test anxiety tend to exhibit a wide range of negative, harmful thought patterns, which we’ll collectively refer to as “negative attitudes.”

Negative Attitudes

Common examples of these hazardous attitudes include:

I’ll never get good at math.

The EA is too hard. It tests me on topics that have nothing to do with getting my EMBA.

The EA is stupid. Why do I have to waste my time studying for this test?

I’ll never be able to get fast enough at answering the questions on the EA.

The material tested on the EA won’t be useful to me after I take the test.

I can’t remain calm and focused while taking the EA.

Positive Self-Talk

Students who score well on the EA don’t engage in this negative self-talk. Instead, they view the EA dispassionately, even positively. They tend to be realistic and optimistic when it comes to their current level of preparation, score goals, and how much time and energy will be required to reach their goals. Examples of their self-talk include:

I must get better at math. Over time and with hard work, I will improve my skills.

Yes, the EA is challenging, but I’m up for the task. Nothing of value in life is earned without hard work.

I can use the EA as a tool to help me gain a seat at a top business school. I’m not entitled to anything unless I’m willing to spend the time to earn it.

Although studying may not be my favorite activity, I realize that in today’s world, knowledge is power. With it, I will have a competitive advantage.

The EA tests reading skills, quantitative skills, and logic and critical reasoning skills. These are vital to success in business school and beyond.

The EA may be a critical assessment but I can take many steps, both in my studying and during the test, that will help me to remain calm and focused.

Next, let’s discuss channeling anxiety in a positive direction.

Strategy 7: Transform Anxiety Into Excitement 

Research by HBS professor Alison Wood Brooks supports the idea that getting excited about a stressful task can improve your performance on that task.

Brooks avers that many people think that trying to calm down is the best way to deal with anxiety. But she discovered something interesting: people who got excited while anticipating a stressful task performed better.

In one experiment, Brooks studied how treating anxiety as excitement helped students perform better on a timed math test. (Sound familiar?) One group said “try to remain calm” out loud, while the other group exclaimed “try to get excited.” Brooks found that the students who said “try to get excited” performed significantly better than those in the “try to remain calm” group.

Key takeaways? First, if you’re feeling anxious about taking the EA, tell yourself that what you’re feeling is actually excitement. When you sit down to study, say something like, “I’m excited about getting these math questions correct” or “I’m excited about getting a great score on the EA.” Find a mantra that makes sense to you. Use your mantra before taking your actual EA. Then, if you find yourself experiencing some stress during the test, take a moment to remind yourself that the stress is keeping you on your toes.

Let’s consider using a mantra.

Strategy 8: Find Your Mantra

Positive statements can help with test anxiety. Create a mantra that you like and repeat it often. For example: “I will achieve my score goal on the EA” or “Nothing can keep me from doing my best.” Keep repeating your mantra. Over time, you will come to believe it.

If too much anxiety starts to overwhelm you, employ a different positive affirmation. You might say “I worked hard, and I know this stuff. I won’t get rattled.” This is an affirmation that you can use to recenter yourself and help yourself refocus.

Another simple yet effective mantra is: “I can handle this.”

Now, let’s look at the importance of controlling your breathing.

Strategy 9: Be Aware of Your Breathing

We’ve already discussed that increased breathing is a common symptom of test anxiety. It should come as no surprise that calm people breathe deeply. Interestingly, breathing like a calm person can actually make you calmer. When you engage in deep breathing, you deliver more oxygen to your brain and calm your mind and your system.

So, whether you are taking the EA itself, a practice test, or even just doing some practice problems, breathe deeply to calm yourself, making sure your breaths don’t stop in your chest but go lower, into your abdominal area. Doing this type of breathing is one of the most effective ways to reduce anxiety.

Next, let’s see how getting busy answering questions can decrease anxiety

Strategy 10: Stem the Anxiety Tide by Getting Busy Answering Questions

What if you were to practice all of the strategies introduced so far and still found yourself becoming anxious while taking the actual EA? Do you just stop and go home? Definitely not!

We at Target Test Prep have discovered something over the years: eliminating test anxiety entirely is pretty much impossible. So, should you just stop reading now and give up on getting rid of test anxiety?? Not at all!

Realize, as we have, that, eliminating all anxiety is not the goal. Rather, the goal — and a key part of succeeding on the EA — is to deal with any anxiety that you do experience.

Don’t Get Stressed About Being Stressed! Focus on Answering Questions!

So, what do you do if you feel yourself becoming anxious while taking the EA? First, as we’ve already learned, some degree of anxious alertness is beneficial. Furthermore, getting anxious about being anxious clearly doesn’t help. Instead, get busy with the task at hand. Focus only on the question in front of you so completely that you don’t even notice your anxiety.

If you focus only on the question in front of you, you will be too busy to make yourself anxious. The intense focus on something other than your anxiety will calm you by distracting you from your feelings of anxiety.

No matter whether you’re taking a practice test or the EA itself, just think about this: whatever is going on, focus on getting the correct answer to the question in front of you. Is the room temperature a bit too cold? Focus on getting the correct answer to the question in front of you. Feeling tired? Focus on getting the correct answer to the question in front of you. Worried about not getting into your first-choice program? You can fall apart or pass out after you have answered the last question on the test. But while you are taking the exam, focus on the question at hand and nothing else.

Next, let’s discuss how pursuing perfection can increase anxiety.

Strategy 11: Quit Focusing on Perfection!

“Done is better than perfect.” This quote from Sheryl Sandberg reminds us of another major difference in the thinking of students who experience test anxiety and those who don’t: the former have a need to be perfect. Often, this need for perfection comes with a need to get things done as quickly as possible. This is a lose-lose scenario when preparing for the EA.

Perfectionist students see a missed question as an affront to their perfectionist vision rather than an opportunity to get better. If they take too long to answer a question, they see it as a sign that they are not where they need to be instead of an indication that they will get better with more practice. And if their score on an EA practice test is 150, they feel that they are failing rather than feeling that they are making progress toward their goal.

You must realize that you don’t need to get every question correct on the EA. You do not need to score in the stratosphere to be admitted into your desired program. You simply must score well enough to show that you can handle the academic rigor of the program in which you’re interested.

Let’s now look at how you can leverage the compound effect to reach your goals.

Strategy 12: Leverage the Compound Effect

The compound effect states that small but consistent changes over time can yield dramatic results. For example, if you cut your daily caloric intake by just 200 calories a day for 6 months you’d lose over 10 pounds. Or if you learned just one line of Hamlet’s soliloquy (“to be or not to be”) each day, you’d master it in just over a month!

We can apply this principle to EA prep. Some students feel that they must study 5 hours a day, every day, in order to make progress. So, on days when they can’t study for 5 hours, they choose not to study at all. These canceled study days can create anxiety that can spill over into test day. These students are not utilizing the compound effect.

Even if you can study for only an hour each day, then over the course of some number of months, you can develop a strong skill set.

Even if you can’t carve out as much study time each day as you’d like, by consistently studying a little each day, you can make large improvements in your skills.

Next, let’s look at why you should have a backup plan.

Strategy 13: Have a Backup Plan

One of the most important actions you can do to help eliminate test anxiety is to have a backup plan. Consider a scenario in which you have one shot to take the EA just before your application deadline. Your EA score may be the deciding factor in your acceptance. Because so much rests on one test, you might be uber-stressed on test day.

You want to have a backup plan. For example, if you don’t hit your EA score goal, a solid Plan B would be to continue studying until you earn it. Reassess your priorities, creating an updated timetable of your work, family, and study commitments. Make your test preparation a (temporary) priority.

Finally, let’s look at one of the easiest strategies for reducing test-day anxiety: staying hydrated!

Strategy 14: Hydrate!

You don’t feel thirsty until you are 1% to 2% dehydrated, but studies show that even 1.5% dehydration can affect a person’s mind and body. Tasks may seem more difficult than normal, and even a person with mild dehydration may be more likely to experience anxiety and tension.

Being properly hydrated reduces physical stress and helps keep you at peak performance. Luckily, the fix for dehydration is simple. Drink water before you start your test, but not so much that you become uncomfortable during the 90-minute exam.

Summary

In this article, we considered the negative effects of anxiety when studying for the EA or taking the test. On test day, you want to focus on getting correct answers rather than experiencing excessive anxiety.

We looked at the following 14 strategies for minimizing anxiety.

1. Be Prepared
2. Take EA Practice Tests
3. Visualize Your Success
4. Practice Exposure Therapy
5. Recognize Anxiety in Your Life
6. Transform Negative Attitudes
7. Transform Anxiety Into Excitement
8. Find Your Mantra
9. Be Aware of Your Breathing
10. Stem the Anxiety Tide by Getting Busy Answering Questions
11. Quit Focusing on Perfection!
12. Leverage the Compound Effect
13. Have a Backup Plan
14. Hydrate!

If you use these strategies to deal with and combat test anxiety, you’ll be able to put your best foot forward on test day and earn the EA score you deserve!

What’s Next?

Need more advice on how to optimize your test-day experience? Check out this article for EA exam-day tips.

Working with an experienced EA tutor can also help you manage your EA-related stress and anxiety. Sign up for a free consultation to learn how one of TTP’s expert tutors can help you achieve your EA goals.