You’ve probably met or heard of someone who claimed to be ‘bad at tests,’ to be ‘anxious about test-taking,’ or some other euphemism for ‘I score poorly.’ The typical explanation for poor scoring is self-serving and naturally has less to do with the person being unintelligent and more to do with anxiety interfering with their ability to show their skills or with tests being unfair.
The anxious tend to do worse on tests not because anxiety interferes with test performance, but because they tend to have lower levels of ability. A possible explanation for the association is, therefore, that living the life of someone with low ability gives people a life of learning experiences that rightly promote anxiety about test performance, even if that anxiety doesn’t play a role in how well people test.
Now there are some gaps in the literature, but thanks to the size of the stereotype threat literature, I think it’s safe to argue those gaps are small.
The biggest gap has to do with the representativeness of sampling and the presence of anxiety as an interfering versus deficit-representing variable in high-stakes settings. Since high-stakes setting tend to see reduced stereotype threat—an anxiety-based hypothesis—I’m going to say ‘anxiety probably has reduced impacts in testing environments that matter.’ One down.
Since we see invariance most of the time in representatively sampled comparisons of demographic groups proposed to be differentially impacted by stereotype threat, I’m going to argue even further that the deficit account is probably right if there’s any truth whatever to groups varying in their anxiety levels. Since invariance generally applies to male-female comparisons and women definitely tend to be more anxious, I’ll wager the support is strong.
Or in other words, it’s not that you’re bad at taking tests5, it’s that you’re just not that smart.
Delusions of Adequacy 
Perhaps, like polling, they give me multiple choice answers that I just don’t like. I am quite good at passing tests, btw, but tests, just like polls, can put you in a box that does not reflect how you feel about any subject. Certainly, some questions have only one correct answer like simple equations. However, asking me what an author of a book ment by stating XYZ two hundred years ago gets more sketchy and the choices given by some modern interpretations of the past are skewed by the ever evolving present. Or maybe I should just lay off the Vodka.
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