Will Meditation Improve Your Scores?

My answer is maybe.

Training your mind to be clear of all thought or to be open and perceptive of its external environment might help with mental willpower, and this might help develop the keen focus you must have to perform on standardized tests. The ability to direct one’s focus is a crucial skill for test-takers. Has meditation improved your ability to focus? If you’ve tried it, you would know. If you haven’t, then you should, and let me know your experience,

Meditation certainly has benefits in sports in which you need to be more perceptive than analytical. Years ago, when I was doing weekly “warrior yoga” training sessions with my college tennis team, I felt like a mental warrior. The cross-training primed me to endure discomfort and to un-focus my mind when I needed to react and hit a tennis ball without analyzing the likelihood missing my 6pm midterm review if I continue to keep winning and bringing this match to a tiebreak.

Back to the topic at hand, while I do believe that mindfulness training has some interesting benefits in other arenas, its advantages for standardized tests might be overstated.

A small, 2013 study (pdf) conducted at UC Santa Barbara suggests mindfulness has benefits for GRE test takers. The researchers compared a cohort that underwent mindfulness training to a control cohort that underwent a course in nutrition. Both cohorts took an abbreviated GRE test before and after their respective courses, and their scores before and after were compared. Those who had undergone mindfulness training had higher scores and lower self-reported rates of distraction during the test.

Great, right? I am not trying to knock down meditation; I’m trying to get at the truth so that you, as a potential test-taker, use your time most effectively to study for your test. If you’ve only got 30 minutes a day for your test, should you meditate or do practice problems? If your only choices are to meditate or take a nutrition course, then meditate, by all means. But you’ve got options.

I think the students in the study would have been better off using 100% of their test prep time to study. That’s right—I think that meditation has a lot of cool benefits, but that those benefits pale in comparison to those garnered from studying. I’m not here to give life advice; I’m here to tell you how to do well on your test. The only thing that comes close to life advice on this blog is about staying positive.

So now I will cast doubt on this study. Because people in our society are already conditioned to believe in the benefits (or superpowers, depending on whom you ask) of meditation, there might have been a bit of a confirmation bias or placebo effect in the meditation. Sure enough, the mindfulness group’s self-reported mind-wandering dropped more extremely than did its prompted mind-wandering. The greatest effect of the meditation course? Not the increase in score, but the decrease in self-reported mind-wandering.

If the link is to be believed, then it’s possible, and I think likely, that by demanding students to focus, the meditation course primed the students for the standardized test in a way the nutrition class did not. A knowledge-based class, especially one that is not graded, allows for mind-wandering. The nutrition students’ assignment of recording their daily caloric intakes could not have been graded or checked for accuracy, and students completing this task would have been aware of this fact. Thus, there was no incentive for students in the nutrition class to focus.

Just as tai chi is better than sitting, in terms of fitness, yet both are schooled by an aerobic activity such as running, swimming, or interval training, meditation might be better than nutrition, in terms of test prep. Yet, both activities might be schooled by the heart of the matter, the actual test prep itself. If you’re going to hire someone to help you get ready for your test, please don’t hire a yogi. Hire me.

Even without a test prep tutor to help you focus, as I would do, there are a lot of different ways you can practice focusing. One of those ways is to start focusing on lots and lots of practice problems. Not only do you build mental toughness and stamina in the parts of your brain most relevant to the test, but you also get to practice math, reading, and the other things that are actually tested. While you might derive a mindful benefit from focusing on your breath, repeating a mantra, or really being present in the sensations in your body, you might benefit more from reviewing formulas in your head, going over what you missed in the last practice session, and congratulating yourself on problems well done.

That said, if you’re curious about meditation, here’s a 4-min read blog post written by one of my former clients, Lisa, and her husband, Matt. I was lucky to get to work on writing with Lisa in fall 2017, as she was already a talented writer and blogger. Her review of me is here.