Why smart people fail tests?

The people who are most likely to succeed could also be the most likely to choke under pressure.
Those who are blessed with brains and what scientists call a high working-memory capacity are expected to do well on tests, but a study from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio and Michigan State University in East Lansing finds that these same people often crack under pressure and do much worse on simple exams than when they are allowed to work with no constraints, report LiveScience and HealthDayNews.

Why? It's internal pressure--that feeling of, "I can't mess up!" These thoughts reside in the same area of the brain as the high working-memory and they actually compete for the same space, limiting the person's ability to do the task at hand. "When they begin to worry, then they're in trouble," Sian Beilock, assistant professor of psychology at Miami and co-researcher along with Thomas Carr of Michigan State, told LiveScience. "People with lower working-memory capacities are not using that capacity to begin with, so they're not affected by pressure."

Also called short-term memory, working memory allows us to hold information in our brain that is relevant to performance and ensures that we focus on the task at hand. It is because of working memory that we can remember and retrieve information for a long task, such as long division. "In these math problems students have to perform subtraction and division, and if you're trying to hold information in your memory and you start worrying about performance, then you can't use your entire mental capacity to do the math," Beilock told LiveScience.

In this study, 93 Michigan State students were divided into two groups based on their working memory capacity. Both groups were given the same test, a 24-problem math exam, in a low-pressure environment. The students with high working memory substantially outperformed those with low working memory. But when the pressure was put on--students were told not only that they were part of a team and an improved score would earn a cash reward, but also that their performance was being judged by math professors--the group with the high working memory choked. Their score dropped to that of the group with the low working memory, whose performance was not affected by the increased pressure.

Working memory is a critical component to getting a high score on important standardized tests, such as the SAT, GRE, LSAT, and MCAT. And this is why being a genius does not guarantee a perfect score on the SAT.

Take heart, brainiacs. All is not lost. Jeremy Gray, an assistant professor of psychology at Yale University, told HealthDayNews that smart people can regain their natural advantage by rehearsing the test in an equally pressure-filled environment. "You can really do a lot through practice and training to improve," he said. The research findings were published in the journal Psychological Science.