I have a bad reaction to tests (especially in math). I know the material all day long and suddenly a test comes along, my mind blanks, I sweat profusely, and I begin to question just about every little thing I do. This is even more noticeable to me in my calculus classes which results in me making dumb mistakes and doing worse than I know I should. For instance, I can do the homework all day and solve the had word problems with ease. When the test comes around, I'm scrunched over the problems with thousands of thoughts pouring through my head without writing a single number down. My heart races along with the clock as if trying to keep up with the seconds I'm losing.

A similar feeling happens when I'm called to show how to solve a problem on the board. In one of my college programming classes I was called to show a function that would return the min and max values. I'd been programming as a hobbyist before college and am very confident in my abilities, but I hesitated on such a simple function that I knew by heart. By the time I was finished, of course it was correct, but I remember being so paranoid about writing my answer on the board. I wonder "what's wrong with me?"

I do want to point some blame on the way I was raised. My mother was somewhat abusive and any little thing I did "wrong" resulted in some form of scaring punishment (not all the time mind you) But the feeling was the same. "What if they catch me being wrong?" Which is an absurd thought because we're going to make mistakes, but I have this unnatural fearing-urge to be correct majority of the time that I am usually wrong since I'm so focused on needing to be correct.

I don't know. I'm off topic, but my point was to ask how you calm yourself before a test? It's essential to do well on tests (people deduce what you are capable of even in the work place I'm sure) and I cannot allow this to happen to me any longer. Any other poor test-takers out there with a story to share?

The answer to "What if they catch me being wrong?" is, as you must already know, pretty much nothing bad, now there's a difference between being aware of that, convinced of that, and knowing it deeply, only a psychiatrist can help you there (or time, but this would help get rid of it faster). I very much suggest visiting one as this issue seems to strongly impair your life and i assume also negatively reflects on your school results

I guess not many other people have this predicament then?

http://en.wikipedia....ki/Panic_attack
I imagine a lot of people suffer from them. I used to get the same feeling. Went away when I found out I was the person setting the curve for all my classes. My test paranoia caused me to over study and memorize everything word for word. That and my panic attack froze time during a Physics 2 test, and I was one of like 20 people in a class of 100 people to finish the exam on time. (Same symptoms as the ones you describe. Brain races on random topics. Focus shifts).

The one thing that sucks about panic attacks is suddenly remembering an answer after you leave an exam because your brain decided to block it out somehow until the test was over.

Then again you're on your own for the showing work in front of people. Take a public speaking class. The more you speak in front of people the more relaxed you get. I lecture a CS lab so it's allowed me to become extremely comfortable talking in front of groups of people.

I have always been good at tests. Never studied, always passed, even when sleeping through or skipping classes. So no.. definitely no test anxiety.

Bascially you need to realize and accept you are an introvert and think of Feynman quote "What do you care what other people think".
Works for me anyways. Only side effect is that some people will notice you are not paying attention or doing enough eye contact since you are trying to devote all your brain power to problem on hand

[size=1]Social pressures cause people's IQ to drop

I know the feeling. I've failed plenty of technical interviews from the on-the-spot anxiety. I've gotten important math tests with really hard questions I have no clue on how to solve. I know that I'm smart enough to know how to figure out how to solve something I don't know, but tests are a meaure of what you know right now without any outside assistance. I've also played thousands of games of chess. Initially, I had the same anxiety every time I played. I think it all stems from a fear of failure in front of others. So, how do you get over it? Get good at failing. Fail a lot. Get used to the feeling so that you can get over it quicker. Once you're good at failing and you don't fear it, the anxiety of failing goes away. Once failure is something you can accept with a shrug, you can try over and over again, succeeding or failing each time, and learning from your mistakes with each iteration. Eventually, the frequency of your failures will be less since you've gained a mastery over the subject, but mastery of it comes from the experience of making many mistakes along the way and trying to learn how to avoid repeating the same mistake. I personally view my mistakes and failures as an affirmation of my humanity (as in "yup, the robot overlords haven't taken over humanity and converted me to a robotic cyborg...yet! whew!").

I realize now that I was fortunate to go through a schooling system that prepared us well for exams. The first thing is that we did formal exams every year. So when you actually got to exams that mattered you had some experience. We also got coaching in how to manage the kinds of feelings your talking about because everyone experiences them in the beginning. Over time people develop there own approaches that work best for them but classic techniques are to manage your time. Often you know the structure of the exam ahead of time so figure out how much time you are going to spend on each section. Also, take the first 5 minutes to read through the exam -- it gets the questions into your head and taking that deliberate pause encourages a sense of control. In math, one of the techniques that I used was to write my working out fully and clearly, making sure that each step was obvious so that I did not make silly little mistakes along the way.

There are lots of little tricks you can use to cope with these sorts of feelings, but mostly in amounts to having a game plan that lets you take (at least) small steps and makes progress because making progress is a good way of combating fear and anxiety in an exam.