After reading my post, do you think I have test anxiety or ADD?

[Eohippus]

Hi all,

Sorry for the long post. I'm new here. I came here out of sheer desperation. I am a "mature" college student, having returned to college after having been in the work world for two decades.

Now that I am back in college and pursuing a new undergraduate degree in preparation for graduate work. I am having a horrendous time. My grades started out okay, but much of the material was familiar. Once I got into unfamiliar material, my grades started to go down.

It was not a matter of studying; that's all I really do nowadays is study. But I fidget a lot, can't sit for long periods while studying, so I study in 30 minute intervals. But I can remember only little of what I read, zoning out while reading, or getting distracted by noise and commotion around me. I need near absolute quiet to study. I bought a pair of ear mufffs, which helps me to block out sound but the zoning still persists, especially on tests.

But I cannot wear the ear muffs on a test (against school rules).
I started blanking out on tests, unable to recall information during a test. But once the test was over, I could recall much of what I failed to do during the test. Time tended to move fast on tests (which means I was thinking slowly), and my thought processes started getting jumbled. Once the test was over, my thinking cleared up.

So I thought that I had test anxiety, and went through months of test desensitization. I also underwent hypnosis to improve concentration and reduce test stress. Unfortunately, test-taking ability did not change at all, and actually got worse.

Now I'm starting to see things that aren't there or failing to see things that are there on tests: On Monday I had a physics test, and I repeatedly read numbers wrong, so I did calculations wrong. For example, I read a positive number as a negative number -- despite checking it repeatedly during the test. I didn't realize it until the test was over and I looked at the test form.

On another exam and I skipped a whole block of questions (it was a scantron form). Before turning in the test, I checked over the test before turning it in, yet I failed to see this block. In fact, I could swear that I had marked all answer slots. However, when I reviewed the test after it was graded, there was clearly a section of answers that were not marked. Even the professor was puzzled why I didn't finish the test; honestly, I cannot say -- I thought I _had_ finished the test.

Other times, when I get a test back, especially a multiple choice test, I am puzzled why I answered one question the way I did. I know the right answer, but for some reason marked down another wrong answer during the exam.

The common denominators to all of this are: tests and memory. Limited ability to memorize before a test, or faulty recall during a test or no recall during a test, misreading numbers and words during a test, left-right switching, confusion, and slow thinking during a test.

I've gone to many learning counselors, and I've been trying their methods for the past 6 semesters. Each semester my grades are worse than the previous semester. Last semester was C's and D's. Now my GPA won't qualify me for the graduate work that I had originally gone back to school in order to prepare for, and I don't know what to do about this.

[casper]

Sounds like text anxiety to me.