Photographic memory + test anxiety?

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Anyone else have issues with this?

In what respect?

I have what I call a quasi-photographic memory. I could study for hours and have no clue if I knew the exam material. Sit down to take the exam and all the information would pour out onto the page....most of the time.

I eventually stopped stressing over exams and just spent two hours the night before reviewing my notes. I had no sense of being more prepared if I invested more time and energy, so I gave up trying so hard.

That is not particularly far from my own experiences. In graduate school, I had a more extreme example. We were given nearly 9 months to study for a comprehensive exam that required us to sit in a room and answer 4 questions about our fields of study, amounting to about 20 pages of text from memory during an 8 hour test. If we failed, we had one more shot 4 months later. If we failed that, we were out of the program. As you might imagine, there's a fair degree of test anxiety associated with this entire process.

It's difficult to explain the process, because I didn't feel overwhelmingly prepared for the test, but once I began writing, the information seemed, as zer0netgain describes, to pour into the keyboard and onto the screen. Other testing experiences have been similar, but the anxiety is almost always there.

Always test anxiety, for all exams. I seemed to do better when I wasn't as prepared and everything would somehow coming pouring out from all corners of my brain. Sometimes I could often picture where something (e.g. key word) was on a page, when I couldn't remember much else.

I often felt guilty because I did better than my friends by cramming.

An interesting point I found to be true by asking other NT people in a similar situation (and it's advice I give for grad students).

Stress does more to lower your grades than anything you could fail to do. It takes energy from what you need to do and diverts it into pointless worrying.

One guy did as I was doing and STOPPED CARING about his grades. He was a cop who took the LSAT and got accepted to law school. Struggled his first year doing everything they suggested to get good grades and just scraped by. Over the summer (married with a kid), he realized that the worst thing that could happen is that he flunk out of law school and had to go back to being a cop. He stopped worrying. Put in 1/3 of the effort and watched his grades go up. WORRY was costing him points.

Someone with AS might have more cause to be concerned because we might think getting kicked out of school means we won't be able to support ourselves or be prosperous, but in truth, that mental trap only puts stress on us because we aren't aware of the fact that in a worst case situation, life would go on and we'd probably do no worse in the long run.

My memory isn't completely photographic but it is pretty good.