Are your practice exam scores dropping and your morale with them? Possible causes, how to read your mistakes properly and how score anxiety affects exam prep.
The results of Sunday morning's practice exam are announced on Tuesday. You look at the noticeboard in the school corridor or at the prep centre's app; your TYT net score, which was 85 last month, is 71 this time. (In Turkish exams, the "net" score is correct answers minus a fraction of wrong answers; the TYT is the first session of the YKS, Turkey's national university entrance exam.) There was a drop in the previous practice exam too. A calculation starts in your head straight away: "At this rate I'll be down to 60 by the exam and won't get in anywhere." For the rest of the day you don't even remember what you ate or whom you spoke to. When your practice exam scores are dropping, it is not just a number that changes; motivation, sleep and self-confidence are shaken too. In this article we look at how to read falling scores without panicking, the possible causes of the drop, and the points both students and families can pay attention to during this time.
Practice Exam Scores Dropping: What Should You Look at First?
The purpose of a practice exam is not to judge you but to give you information. As the preparation period drags on, however, practice exams can turn into a weekly court in which your own worth is on trial. Before assessing a drop in your scores, the first question to ask should not be "How much has it dropped?" but "What is this drop telling me?"
To be able to ask this question, the emotion first needs to settle a little. Trying to analyse on the day the results come out is often unproductive, because disappointment makes every wrong answer look like proof of the sentence "I can't do it." Coming back to the results a day later with a calmer mind can let you see the same picture very differently.
This is not limited to final-year high-school students preparing for the YKS. A thirteen-year-old preparing for the LGS (Turkey's national high-school entrance exam) can be shaken in the same way by the practice exam report that arrives from their prep centre every month. Because children of this age find it harder to put their feelings into words, the effect of falling scores sometimes appears as irritability, stomach aches or being unable to sleep the night before a practice exam. Whatever the age, talking about the feeling first and the number second works.
Look at the Curve, Not a Single Exam
Practice exam scores fluctuate by nature. The result of a single practice exam depends on many factors: how you slept that night, the distribution of topics in the questions, how difficult the publisher who prepared the exam made it, the atmosphere in the exam room and whatever you went through that week. That is why ups and downs of a few points may not mean a real decline.
To see a more meaningful picture, you can do the following:
- Look at the average of your last four or five practice exams. A single low result usually remains an expected deviation within the average.
- Don't weigh practice exams from different publishers on the same scale. Some publishers deliberately set harder questions. A score that drops in a harder exam may be a sign of the exam's difficulty rather than of you.
- Break it down subject by subject. Your total score may have dropped; but perhaps the drop is in only one subject while progress continues in the others.
- Take your ranking into account too. In an exam that everyone found difficult, your ranking may have stayed the same even though your score fell.
There are also "plateau" periods in preparation. While new topics are being learnt or study methods changed, scores may stall for a while or even dip. This does not mean learning has stopped; sometimes knowledge needs time to settle.
A simple way to track your scores is to write down your subject-by-subject results after each practice exam in a notebook or a table, and to look back over this table once a month. A picture that looks like a big drop from a weekly view may, from a monthly view, be a small dip within a slow but steady rise. Doing this tracking at set intervals rather than straight after every result also helps you keep a healthy distance from the numbers.
Why Do Practice Exam Scores Drop?
If there is a real and persistent drop, it is important to understand its causes.
The Scope of Topics Widening
At the start of the preparation year, practice exams are usually limited to the topics covered so far. As the year goes on, the scope widens and topics that have not yet been studied, or not revised enough, start to appear. A drop during this period is largely to be expected.
Not Enough Revision
While focusing on new topics, older ones can be forgotten. A topic you knew very well in October may have weakened by February because it was not revised.
Fatigue and Burnout
A heavy pace kept up for months, lack of sleep and not making time to rest directly reduce mental performance. Our article on Year 12 burnout may give you insight into this situation in the middle of the exam year.
A Study Method That Has Become Unproductive
Watching hours of topic-explanation videos or making summaries with coloured pens gives a sense of studying but does not always develop exam skills. When not enough time is given to solving questions, analysing mistakes and spaced revision, scores can stall or fall despite a lot of studying. In this case the problem is not the effort but its direction.
Rising Anxiety
Anxiety that grows as the exam approaches can lead to scattered attention during practice exams, poorer time management and getting questions wrong that you know. A drop in one practice exam leads to going into the next one more anxious, and the cycle feeds itself.
The Rest of Life
An illness in the family, the end of a relationship, tension with friends or financial difficulties at home reduce the mental energy available for studying. Scores are sometimes the first sign of a burden that has nothing to do with lessons.
Reading Your Mistakes: Four Types of Error
The value of a practice exam lies in the analysis of your mistakes. Not every wrong answer is of the same type, and each type has a different solution.
- Mistakes due to gaps in knowledge: Questions on topics you don't know or haven't understood well enough. The solution is to study the relevant topic again.
- Attention errors: Misreading the question, making a calculation error, missing the word "not". The solution is not to study more topics but to change how you read questions.
- Time-management errors: Not reaching the end, getting stuck on one question, hurriedly marking answers in the last minute. The solution is to develop a strategy for choosing and skipping questions during the exam.
- Anxiety-related errors: Being unable to recall something you know in the moment, changing your first answer at the last second. The solution is to work on skills for coping with anxiety.
Sorting your mistakes into these four groups after each practice exam turns the vagueness of "My scores are dropping" into the clarity of "This week I made mostly attention errors." Vagueness feeds anxiety; clarity leads to action.
Let's say you saw that your maths score had dropped. When you examine your mistakes, you notice that six of your ten wrong answers were calculation errors. In this case, rather than studying a new topic, building a habit of spending a few seconds checking the working on each question could affect your scores much more quickly.
How Do Falling Scores Affect Your Emotions?
Falling scores are not only a matter of a study plan; they have a deep emotional impact. Many students begin to equate their scores with their own worth: "If my scores are high I'm worth something; if they're low I'm worthless."
This equation has several consequences:
- Avoiding practice exams: Some students stop sitting practice exams for fear of getting a bad result. Yet this prevents them from getting used to exam conditions.
- Self-punishment: Forbidding yourself rest, seeing friends or sleep after a bad practice exam. This increases fatigue and makes the next practice exam even harder.
- Constant comparison: Following classmates' scores and results shared on social media makes it harder to see your own progress.
- Catastrophising: The thought "At this rate I won't get in anywhere" builds a scenario stretching from a single data point to the whole future.
A practice exam result is a snapshot of that Sunday morning; it is not your whole story.
The night before a practice exam also needs to be taken into account. Solving questions late into the night out of anxiety about the previous result means sitting the exam in the morning with a tired mind. Planning practice exam days like the real exam day, that is, going to bed early, having breakfast and not looking at a new topic just before the exam, affects both the score and the feeling.
When you notice these thoughts, you can ask yourself: "What is this result really telling me, and how much extra meaning am I loading onto it?" For more comprehensive information about anxiety during the exam period, see our article on exam anxiety.
For Families: When You Worry Because Practice Exam Scores Are Dropping
Falling scores are worrying for parents too. But how that worry reaches the young person matters.
- Don't make practice exam results the only topic at home. Talking about scores at every evening meal makes the young person feel as if they are in the exam hall at home too.
- Don't immediately link a drop in scores to laziness or the phone. First try to understand, together with the young person, what has changed.
- Don't hold up the scores of cousins, neighbours' children or classmates as examples.
- Make room for the young person's own analysis: "What do you think made this practice exam hard for you?" is far more productive than "Why is it so low?"
- If the drop continues and the young person is clearly unhappy, it helps to talk to the school counsellor and, if needed, consider professional support.
In some schools and prep centres, practice exam rankings are pinned to the noticeboard or shared in parents' groups. These lists can trigger a sense of comparison in parents too. Rather than looking at the list and immediately commenting to your teenager, first noticing your own feeling and asking "Why have I become so tense right now?" makes your reaction more measured. In the exam year, a parent's calm directly affects how much the young person can carry.
Seeing the young person's effort and appreciating it regardless of the result is one of the most important ways of protecting their motivation.
When Should You Seek Professional Support?
Fluctuating scores are a normal part of exam preparation. In the following situations, however, it may help to seek support from a professional:
- Intense anxiety, nausea, palpitations or sleeplessness occur before every practice exam
- The young person avoids sitting practice exams
- The drop in scores is accompanied by unhappiness, lack of motivation and an inability to enjoy things
- They constantly criticise themselves and make statements expressing worthlessness
- Thoughts of giving up studying altogether or abandoning the exam have become prominent
- The young person says they don't want to live or talks about thoughts of harming themselves; in this case call 112 (emergency services) immediately
These signs do not on their own amount to a diagnosis; but they may suggest that the difficulty has gone beyond exam stress. In such a situation, seeking support early rather than waiting for the time left until the exam both protects the young person's mental health and makes the rest of the preparation period more sustainable.
How Is Exam Performance Anxiety Addressed in Therapy?
When practice exam scores are dropping and this markedly affects the young person's mood, therapy can offer a space to understand and break this cycle.
In the cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) approach, the thoughts that arise along with falling scores are examined: "At this rate I won't get in", "I'm not clever enough", "Everyone is doing better than me" and so on. How realistic these thoughts are and what evidence they rest on are assessed together. The young person learns to notice the tendency to generalise from a single result and to make a more balanced assessment.
On the behavioural level, work focuses on coping with anxiety during practice exams, time management and finding a balance with rest. Perfectionism and the link drawn between success and worth are also an important part of the process. Sessions with the family provide an opportunity to review the atmosphere and expectations at home. For more information about work with adolescents, see the adolescent counselling page.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many practice exams should I do a week?
How well each practice exam is analysed matters more than how many you do. Practice exams done back to back without analysis both increase fatigue and lead to the same mistakes being repeated. It helps to decide how often to sit them together with your school counsellor, based on your own level of preparation.
Will I score as low in the real exam as in the practice exams?
Practice exams give an idea of exam performance, but they do not offer a definite prediction. The result in the real exam depends on many factors, such as preparation in the final period, anxiety management and conditions on exam day. It is not right to draw firm conclusions about the real exam from a single practice exam result.
Practice exams make me very tense; is it all right if I don't sit them?
Avoiding practice exams altogether may bring relief in the short term, but it prevents you from getting used to real exam conditions. If the anxiety is very intense, doing practice exams at home for a while, timing yourself and without sharing the results, can be an intermediate step. If anxiety is clearly affecting your life, getting support for it is helpful.
Should I change my study timetable while my scores are falling?
Before changing your timetable, it is important to understand the reason for the drop. If the problem is a gap in knowledge, the emphasis should go on studying topics; if it is attention errors, on how you read questions; if it is fatigue, on rest. Rebuilding the timetable from scratch with every drop, on the other hand, can damage your sense of continuity.
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Eda Erkan Alapala
Klinik Psikolog. İstanbul Kent Üniversitesi Klinik Psikoloji Tezli Yüksek Lisans mezunu; bilişsel davranışçı terapi, çocuk merkezli oyun terapisi ve çocuk-ergen psikoterapisi alanlarında eğitimlerini tamamlamıştır.
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