A survey on the students’ exam anxiety in the Fatemeh (P.B.U.H.) College of Nursing and Midwifery, Spring 2004

Background: Nowadays, since a hard educational competition can be seen among students, exam anxiety is increasing. Anxiety causes concentration deviation, so that data processing will decrease. Also previous studies have shown pessimistic thoughts make the students to expect failure, so that the student can not concentrate on the exam, and as a result he will not get a positive result. Objective: To determine the level of students’ exam anxiety in Fatemeh (P.B.U.H) College of Nursing and Midwifery. Methods: This analytic descriptive study was done on 317 students educating in Fatemeh College of Nursing and Midwifery. A questionnaire consisting of 24 background questions and Spilberger’s anxiety test with 32 questions were used to gather the data. These questionnaires were given to the students in the exam salon before the final exam. Measures of central tendency, dispersion index, t-test and one way ANOVA were used to analyze the data. Results: The findings showed that 90.9% of the students had anxiety in low level, 6.4% had in medium level and 1.7% had a high level anxiety. The mean ( ± standard deviation) of exam anxiety of the students was 25.76% (±16.59). The mean (±standard deviation) of exam anxiety among the nursing students was 25.2 (±16.45) and among the midwifery students, it was 26.78 (±16.9), but no significant difference was found between exam anxiety in terms of major (P>0.05). A significant difference was observed in anxiety level, in terms of sex, marital status, parent’s education and the number of siblings. Conclusion: Using consultation strategies and making a friendly intervention between students and teachers is recommended for the students with high level of test anxiety to identify the problems and try to solve them. To relieve anxiety, consultation interventions by specialists, relaxation, using comics and jokes in exams will be helpful. Keywords: nursing student, midwifery student, test anxiety, evaluation