Dealing with Testing Anxiety

Hello! So AP testing scores came out and it made me feel really cruddy because I have such bad testing anxiety and it causes me to just not be able to test well. I have gotten poorer scores than my friends who I knew just the same amount as on the topic, yet even with studying I get flustered and forget everything if I don’t continuously memorize a certain thing for the test. I hate it so much and it makes me feel like I don’t know as much. Though, I DO know in my mind that testing isn’t really testing your knowledge and it just tests if you know how to test, but I can’t help but feel dumb to when I compare to others. It’s even worse in my AP classes when everyone automatically got the information they just learned and I am still processing because my brain just thinks about everything all the time and I have to sort of get around the other things in my mind to grasp a concept if that makes sense. I don’t want to have to figure out how to test, and next school year my two AP classes have an alternative pay for college class option where you get the credits if you get a passing grade without the end of the year test so I don’t feel like I need to learn how to test. Anyway, I just want to know about others and their testing anxiety experience if they have any. My therapist knows about it but I really don’t want to change it because I totally don’t think testing is really the best way to go, in fact SAT isn’t even needed for the college I want to go to so I don’t care much.