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The best time to take exams is at noon

2023-05-30T21:42:05.778Z

Highlights: An analysis of half a million British tests establishes that 13.30 is the time when students achieve better grades. The circadian rhythm, the biological clock that determines the rhythm of human activity based on the hours of the day, is important in determining how humans are active. By law, university students in Great Britain can only have one exam a day at pre-arranged times: nine in the morning,13.30 and 16.30. Researchers Alessio Gaggero and Denni Tommasi have used the British higher education system for their study.


An analysis of half a million British tests establishes that 13.30 is the time when students achieve better grades


The circadian rhythm, the biological clock that determines the rhythm of human activity based on the hours of the day, is important in determining how humans are active. And for the success of that activity. It is a classic division between larks, who have their cognitive abilities at their peak in the morning, and owls, those who begin to deploy all their energy as the night approaches. That rhythm also has its importance in the performance of students who, depending on which group they belong to, prefer to study at one time or another. They can choose that. What they have no say about is when to take the exam.

A study by researchers from the University of Granada (UGR) and Bologna has analyzed half a million exam results and, in case teachers are encouraged to help students a little, they have concluded that 13.30 hours or, generically, noon, is the time of the best grades. This, in addition, is significantly more noticeable in STEM exams (English acronym for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics subjects).

Researchers Alessio Gaggero, from the UGR, and Denni Tommasi, from the University of Bologna, have used the British higher education system for their study because of the more subjective characteristics of the examination method. There, university exams are distributed in an "almost random" way, they explain, the Student Services Offices (Student Services Offices, in Spanish) of each university. By law, university students in Great Britain can only have one exam a day at pre-arranged times: nine in the morning, 13.30 and 16.30. It is a computer program that distributes exams, and teachers and students find out at the same time when and at what time the exam is.

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The research focuses on this educational system because computer chance (with the exception of certain variables such as available spaces, the number of students of a specific exam and the duration of the exam mainly) suppresses any human conditioning that could have made decisions such as, for example, placing difficult exams first thing in the morning.

Analyzing those 503,358 test scores from 51,555 students taken between 2014 and 2010, the researchers describe an inverted U-shaped yield curve. That is, of the three schedules, the best grades leave at 13.30. Between the two remaining schedules, Alessio Gaggero explains that "the one in the afternoon, the one at 16.30 p.m., is by very little the next best". Thus, the early 9.00 is the least convenient for students. Therefore, everything indicates that noon is the average time that best goes for both larks and owls.

The research, published in The Economic Journal (Oxford University Press), shows that "students perform worse by not being evaluated at the peak of their cognitive abilities", which is at noon, and, on the other hand, also that the results are worse in the morning exams, those of nine in the morning, because there the owls can arrive with some sleep deprivation.

So far, according to the researchers, the relationship between performance in important tests (such as the classic Selectivity or job interviews) with external factors such as heat or even pollution have been analyzed. Less studied are internal factors such as circadian rhythm, which is related to the external factor of the time of day at which the test takes place. When identifying the effects of what time of day is most interesting for the student, the researchers suggest that there are three other factors that may also influence. Exposure to sunlight, the type of cognitive task and the age of the student.

In the case of light, the differences in results are more significant between the different schedules in the winter exams. That is, the less luminous days, the more a better performance is perceived at noon. When it comes to cognitive task types, performance improvement is most palpable on exams that required "fluid intelligence, i.e., working memory, logical thinking, problem-solving, and abstract reasoning." Finally, students under the age of 20 are also the most sensitive to having different performance depending on the time, explains Gaggero. The sum of all the results indicates that, in the winter exams, especially and for students of the first years of Science, having the tests after noon will offer them a small natural advantage that, if they have studied (that is inevitable), will allow them to get their full potential.

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Source: elparis

All news articles on 2023-05-30

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