Students should never underestimate the effects of test anxiety. Some students will experience such terrible test anxiety that they’ll have a hard time completing almost all exams. The students who have a lot of test anxiety at the best of times will really struggle with it when they prepare for the SAT exam.
The SAT exam is rigidly timed. Students will have to complete all of the different questions very quickly, and they’ll have to avoid spending too much time on any single test question or answer. Some of them might have to decide to skip certain questions altogether, which is a situation that might cause some anxious students to become even more anxious.
SAT exam results also certainly matter. An individual math test or essay might not matter all that much over the course of a student’s career. Good students who work hard enough might be able to get around their problems with test anxiety, since grades tend to be based on papers, lab reports, and other assignments and not just exam results. Students won’t have anything else to fall back on when they’re taking the SAT.
Colleges care about lots of things, and not just standardized test scores. However, that doesn’t mean that SAT scores don’t matter. It’s getting harder and harder for even the best students to get into great colleges these days. This will only make anxious students more frightened, which can have a huge effect on their SAT scores. Their scores might not reflect their actual abilities, in fact. Their scores might partly measure the amount of anxiety that they experienced while taking the exams.
SAT tutoring can help students become less anxious. After going through an excellent SAT preparation course, anxious students might not be afraid of the exam any more. They might see their test scores improve dramatically as a result.