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k.wolf
Tufted Titmouse
Tufted Titmouse

Joined: 15 Oct 2017
Gender: Male
Posts: 25

20 Nov 2017, 2:21 pm

Hi. I'm an university student and I had never struggled with staying focused during lectures and exams before in my academic life. Now in my university one of the buildings where I have classes and exams the acoustics are in my opinion beyond terrible. I'm already very sensitive to sound, and inside classrooms I swear I feel every little sound is amplified by 5x at the very least, and you can hear the sound of doors slamming propagating across the whole building. The act of turning a page on my notebook makes such a loud noise, sometimes I am afraid people in the adjacent classroom might be able to hear it!
I don't know what's wrong with this building, maybe they forgot to hire an acoustics engineer when they were designing it - the thing is I find myself getting distracted during class very often, to the point where I've stopped going to one of the lectures (no mandatory attendance) because I couldn't filter out background noise from people chatting/whispering (these people were very far way from me and I was sitting close to the front row, but I was still unable to hear the professor properly); whenever I have exams in this building, I can tell I get distracted a couple of times during it, and this has probably hurt my performance, because it makes me lose track of what I was doing for the moment and then I might make a really stupid mistake (like write a number instead of the other I was thinking about previously etc), or I am just unable to focus to my maximum ability and I get even more anxious.
Something I always do after taking a test is analyzing the questions and my answers in my head (specifically the ones where I didn't feel very confident). When I get home after taking a test in that specific building, I always find one or two things I did wrong due to lack of attention, which makes me really angry at myself and decreases my self-worth significantly because I usually prepare a lot. When I have tests in other buildings though, I do the same and I feel like I did my best and stop thinking about it pretty quickly.
I'm not sure what to do. I don't think I would be allowed to wear ear plugs during tests and I can't afford those high quality ones anyway.



shortfatbalduglyman
Veteran
Veteran

Joined: 4 Mar 2017
Age: 40
Gender: Male
Posts: 9,751

20 Nov 2017, 2:37 pm

If you have not already, get a diagnosis

Disclose to the school

Get testing accommodations

Some accommodations entitle you a separate room

See if you can get a note taker for class


:D


But.... If college classes are too loud, auditorially, for you to successfully take tests in, then many workplaces and other locations are much louder than college classes

What a nightmare

Like I purposely avoid certain bathrooms, like Home Depot, because the hand dryers, plural, are so loud that they have given me multiple headaches.

But there are not many public bathrooms open at 6am where I live.

Logistics