Taking Breaks During Your Test
When I was in college, I was introduced to the 90-minute lecture. From my perspective as a student, any single lecture started out as usual, with me taking notes and thinking about the material in equal measures. But, by the end of the lecture, it was a struggle just to pay enough attention to take useful notes (which I hoped I’d be able to understand later).
Unless, that is, the professor was kind enough to give us a break in the middle of class. That made all the difference: I retained far more information from and did better in those classes. It was in those classes that I really experienced the importance of taking breaks.
One of my professors justified the break schedule by explaining that the human attention span was 45 minutes. (These days it seems like it’s much shorter.) That made us all feel better. It wasn’t our fault that we couldn’t stay focused — it was a physiological response, built into our brains.
Given that an adolescent brain has a hard time paying attention to anything for even 20 or 30 minutes straight, it seems silly that so many tests are so much longer than that. The SAT breaks its test up into sections no more than 25 minutes long, but even that is too long for a lot of students at that age (and that’s completely normal). And, what about other tests? How do you combat mental fatigue when you’re on the hour-long ACT math section, or when you’re taking an in-class final exam?
Simple: take your own breaks.
When the test/section starts, flip to a previously-selected question and make a mark (like a big horizontal line or a star) that will remind you that it’s time to take a break. Your break should be no more than 60 seconds long, and you should try to do something that will temporarily distract you from the fact that you’re taking a test. Distractions can include breathing and relaxation exercises (calm your mind), eating something sour or with a strong taste (distract your senses), or doodling (focus on something else). Don’t use a break to do anything test-related: your attention-span clock won’t reset if you keep your mind on the test.
Whatever you choose as a break, make sure you practice your strategy before the big day. Take practice tests and practice taking breaks too, to see what timing and method works best for you. (Make sure your chosen method cannot distract you so much that you spend more than 60 seconds on it.) Different people have different attention spans, so you need to determine your own personal timing. You want to take as many breaks as you need, but as few as possible, because breaks take time.
Of course, the time it takes to take a break is time you can’t spend answering problems. But it’s still worth it. Let’s say you sacrifice 1 minute for a break, during which you could have answered 1 question. But because you took a break, you were refreshed enough to avoid 3 mistakes. So even though you answered one less question, your score went up by 2 points.
And that’s a pretty conservative estimate of the benefits of taking your own breaks. The real benefit varies from person to person — yet another reason to practice beforehand!