Medical students find assessments stressful. Of course….but what do we do about it?

Excerpt

In this issue, Lyndon et al. [1] present the results of a systematic review on the relationship between academic assessment and psychological distress among medical students. One of their main findings is that different types of assessments are associated with subjective and physiological stress in medical students. As someone who has studied emotions, particularly stress, for 10 years, it would be easy for my response to be ‘of course!’ Medical training and practice are awash with emotional situations, from undergoing high stakes assessments, to the fear of making costly mistakes, to witnessing heartbreaking loss and death. However, this aspect of medical education has, for the most part, been ignored or merely superficially addressed in our study of how medical students learn and perform [2]. The Lyndon et al. paper [1] shines a light on an important and often neglected aspect of learning and performance. …