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Why did Helen consider exams as the major troubles of her college life?
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Helen Keller considered exams a major trouble due to test anxiety and the pressure of cramming at Radcliffe. Despite her love for learning, exams caused her to panic and forget information, making them a "bugbear" or constant irritant. She highlighted the disconnect between true learning and the rote memorization required for exams. Keller also faced unique challenges due to her disabilities, needing adaptive methods to "read" and answer questions, yet she still found success remarkable.
While Helen Keller had a sincere and lifelong love of learning instilled in her by Miss Sullivan, she did find test-taking at Radcliffe challenging. This caused her to muse on her exam experience in her memoir. Like many students before and since, Helen would study diligently and cram her head with knowledge, feeling confident she knew her material. However, once an exam was in front of her, she would panic and blank out. A bugbear is a torment or thorn in one's side, and because of her test anxiety, Helen found the exams a constant irritant or bugbear. As she writes:
The facts you have garnered with such infinite trouble invariably fail you at a pinch.
Keller used, for example, an exam question asking about a man named Huss to illustrate her point:
Huss? Who was he and what did he do? The name looks strangely familiar. You ransack your...
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budget of historic facts much as you would hunt for a bit of silk in a rag bag. You are sure it is somewhere in your mind near the top
Keller differentiated between learning to elevate one's mind and soul and the kind of cramming that she did at Radcliffe to keep up with the other students and prepare for exams. While she was glad to go to college, which had long been a dream of hers, she wished for more time to process her knowledge and less pressure to achieve arbitrary goals like passing exams.
With both truth and humor, Helen describes the act of test-taking in the last six paragraphs of Chapter 20. She loves to learn new material. But she despises tests. She talks about studying for them, spending time cramming before them, and trying to prepare by stuffing every bit of information into her brain. Then when the test time comes, she’s faced with questions about people (for instance) that she cannot remember ever hearing of. “You are amazed at all the things you know which are not on the examination paper,” she says. She puzzles over the possible answers. And then the call comes that the time is up and the test is over. It’s an exasperating situation. And she’s absolutely right: it can be this way. She feels like many of the rest of us feel when we study and take tests on difficult subject matters. We can relate to her plight. What’s most interesting about this story is that she never references here how much more difficult her particular challenge is. She cannot see the test questions and must use adaptive methods to both “read” the questions and to answer them within the allotted time period. The fact that she succeeds at all is still amazing to us today.