Madison gave me a familiar response. “I’m just not a great test taker,” she said with a dismissive shrug. This is a cop-out. I hear this all the time. Virtually every student who consistently struggles blames it on not being a good test taker. There is no doubt that some students have genuine test anxiety and freeze up on test day, even though they know the material. But that is pretty rare. In reality many students have heard adults throw the phrase around, so they think it has some validity. And more important, it absolves them of any responsibility for their own performance. They fail
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