Self-confidence is very important. Or isn't it?

Life is full of uncertainties we have discussed many times, and one question that plagues us in a number of ways is how we are going to react to a situation in the future. Very often we picture ourselves in a certain way, only to find that, once we face the critical moment, our performance does not match our expectations at all. One of the keys to a successful prediction is knowing ourselves, acknowledging our own strengths and weaknesses so that we can leverage the former and mitigate the latter. But in case anything goes wrong, we can always resort to justifying why the outcome was unpredictable and how we did all the things we had to do to get it right even if it did not work out.

While the world evolves at dizzying speeds around us, especially in the age of COVID-19, where weeks and months go by without any feeling of the progress of time, there are other aspects of life that are still dragging their feet or are even blatantly anchored in the nineteenth century, like schools. While there are modern interactive tools which are able to assess in real time your level of understanding of a certain subject and even reinforce the questions where your learning is slower or more uncertain, most schools are still sticking to the plain old exams as means of evaluation.

Photo: Arek Socha

Exams are the kind of events that are doubly hard to gauge: on the one hand most of the knowledge required for the exam is of recent acquisition, so it is not well settled in our mind and, not having previous exam to drive our judgement, it is hard to have an accurate estimate of the performance that we can provide; on the other, the relatively high stakes of the situation, which is likely to be the main (or even the only) indicator for our performance in the last three or six months, puts us in a less-than-optimal state of stress, that is bound to affect us negatively. And although we all have stressful situations in our live and practicing is essential to master the skill, the repeated pressure of the exams probably defeats (at least partially) the concept of play.

From my years in high school and then at university, I remember that I had clearly three distinct attitudes toward the exam depending on my level of self confidence. On one of the spectrum were the exams where I was totally confident. The subject of the exam was well known to me, I had had plenty of time to practice and rummage over it, so I was confident I was going to be able to get a good score (maybe 90% or higher) save for some really strange circumstances. These exams required concentration, but did not put me under a lot of stress, because I was confident.

At the other end lie the (luckily few) exams for which I was openly unprepared. If I did not have the time or the means to prepare the exam adequately I would still try to attend the exam at least to get an impression of the kind of questions that were to be expected. Sometimes I was surprised to see that I knew just enough to be able to make a decent job and pass, but even if I did not, the pressure just was not there because I did not have any expectations.

Finally, the third and most daunting type of exam were the ones where I hoped to pass but I was not confident enough to have no doubt. Those gave me late evenings and sleepless nights, and there is probably a couple of them that I failed out of pure exhaustion. If I had slept better, with the amount of effort that I had put for it I could probably has passed, but after troubled night I was simply not in the condition to perform to the best of my capacity.

Today, I have spent a couple of hours with Jason reviewing his knowledge of kinematics for the Physics exam that he has tomorrow: it is the basic stuff, with the acceleration, velocity and displacement, but still they have not discussed derivatives yet, so the concepts are a bit shaky. Unfortunately for him, he is facing the third type of exam and is likely to have a rough night, but I believe he will do a good job if he manages to keep a cool head.

Raising kids is incredibly rewarding, but sometimes you just wish you could help them all the time and spare them some of the difficult moments. Enjoy your evening.