>I also think your "rather silly" comment is a bit flippant. For someone who is not bothered by tests this might seem reasonable. It's not like I love exams my

>I also think your "rather silly" comment is a bit flippant. For someone who is not bothered by tests this might seem reasonable. It's not like I love exams myself? This is simply something people should learn to deal with. >But for kids that are not ready, introducing them to high stress testing situations can scar them badly and impair their performance for life. If your kid gets scared for life by a test, then I'm afraid you simply haven't prepared them for life at all. Test might be frightening, I'll grant you that, but it's such a normal part of the education system and a lot of other things, that it simply is something one must learn to cope with in some way or another. There's often counseling or guidance you can get if you really have anxiety. >it means inevitably they will do very poorly on the test, which will feed back into their self esteem and have a high risk of setting back their educational progress. Then you deal with that by helping them as I mentioned in the last sentence in the paragraph before. It can also be an indicator that the child simply hasn't learned what it was expected to have learned, and therefore isn't ready to progress yet. Kids aren't fragile little things that'll break so easily. I'll stand on my earlier claim and would say "sparing" them of such things will do more harm to them later on in their life than it will do them good. You can't always hold you child in the hand, and if they never learn to deal with stressful situations it will have a much larger impact later on in life.