Examination-associated anxiety in students of medicine

The authors studied 262 medical students who were in the second year at the University of Barcelona School of Medicine in 1988. The authors measured the students' anxiety as the students were taking each of two examinations on different subjects: one on medical psychology and one on physiology. The State-Trait Anxiety Inventory questionnaire, recently validated in Spanish, was used to measure the students' anxiety associated with the examinations. In addition, analog scales were used to obtain the students' assessment of each examination's difficulty and its importance to them. The findings showed different levels of anxiety in examinations of different subject matters, with a positive correlation between the importance attributed to the examination and the associated anxiety, and a negative correlation between the importance of the examination and the importance attributed to chance in the marking. Implications of these findings and directions for future research are discussed.