As finals are among us, I thought I would address some
superstitions that college students have when they take their exams. For the
book group project, I am reading Believing
in Magic by Stuart Vyse and he talks about some pre-test rituals.
The most
common one he found (and I found when researching) was that students tend to
wear certain clothing on the day of the day. A “lucky scarf” or a “lucky sweatshirt” is
believed by students to “carry a part of their brains” thus making the exam
easier to take. Students believe that by having a specific article of clothing,
they will do better on the exam than if they did not have it at all.
Another
interesting ritual I found was sleeping with the textbook or notes of the class
under your pillow the night before the exam. Some students believe that osmosis,
or the process of absorbing information, helps them understand the test
materials better while they sleep. This was one pre-exam ritual I tried and
learned that it did not help. My knowledge of the material did not come to me
through sleeping on my notes and I felt that it made no impact on my test
score.
The links below have descriptions of other superstitions
and some “proven” research of different topics.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment