Every second, your body tells a story about stress, focus, and performance. We're listening to what it has to say about academic success.
During exams, students' heart rates can increase by 40%, skin conductance spikes 300%, and body temperature rises 0.8°C. But which patterns predict success?
Stress significantly impacts academic performance, but the relationship is complex and varies between individuals. This analysis examines physiological stress markers to understand their correlation with exam scores.
Cardiovascular response to stress and cognitive load during examinations
Skin conductance reflecting emotional arousal and stress responses
Thermal regulation changes in response to psychological stress
Fidgeting and movement patterns indicating restlessness and anxiety
Heart rate (HR) serves as a primary indicator of physiological state during exams. It is influenced by various factors, including cognitive load, emotional state, and environmental conditions, and thus bears the potential to provide insights into student performance.
Our analysis shows that there is a moderate positive correlation between average heart rate and grades. Top-performing students may be more engaged or focused during exams, leading to a higher HR. Alternatively, students who are too relaxed (low HR) might not be as focused, hurting their academic performance.
Traditionally, increase of heart rate (HR) during exams has been viewed as a sign of anxiety or distress, which might be assumed to negatively impact academic outcomes. However, our analysis reveals a positive correlation between average heart rate and exam grades, suggesting that a moderately elevated HR may not be solely indicative of anxiety. Instead, it could reflect beneficial states such as alertness, engagement, or cognitive effort.
While a positive correlation was found between average heart rate and grades, it is critical to acknowledge that correlation does not imply causation. Future studies could explore whether deliberately manipulating HR (for instance, through arousal techniques or relaxation training) has a direct impact on test performance.
Electrodermal activity (EDA) reflects sympathetic nervous system activation and emotional arousal. EDA captures both fast phasic responses (electrodermal responses, EDRs) and slower tonic shifts (skin conductance level, SCL) on a second‐by‐second basis.
Students demonstrate significant EDA spikes during exam. By visualizing and analyzing the data, we found a weak negative correlation between average electrodermal activity (EDA) during exams and students’ grades. This surprisingly suggests that this well-established pressure indicator's relationship may not hold in all contexts.
Mild arousal can actually improve performance (Yerkes-Dodson Law), but too much arousal (stress) impairs it—so, students with moderately low EDA might have the “optimal” level of arousal. In future work, we could try to use a non-linear curve to fit the data and see if there’s a trend.
Also, instead of relying solely on average EDA as an indicator, future studies could explore more detailed aspects of EDA data, such as fluctuations, peaks, or changes during particularly challenging exam moments. This might reveal subtler patterns in how physiological arousal relates to performance.
Body temperature regulation reflects the body's metabolic response to stress. During exams, students typically show slight temperature increases (0.2-0.8°C) due to heightened cognitive activity and stress response.
However, the human body tightly regulates its temperature (around 36.5–37.5°C for most people) through homeostasis. Most healthy people’s body temperatures don’t vary much, so there’s not enough variability in temperature to detect a correlation with something as complex as grades.
Our visualization and analysis indicate that there is a weak positive correlation between average body temperature and academic performance. This outcome aligns with current scientific understanding: altough higher body temperature could indicates better engagement and intense thinking, body temperature of healthy individuals is regulated within a narrow range and is not considered a determinant of cognitive abilities or academic outcomes.
Physical movement and fidgeting patterns provide insight into anxiety and restlessness levels. But surprisingly, we found there is a weak positive correlation between ACC (Accelerometer) and grades. This suggests that the academic performance is not essentially related to the movements of students in exams.
Opposing to our initial speculation that students who don’t know what to do to move more often.
However, since aggregating motion data loses a lot patterns, we strongly suggest follow-up researches could focus on potential patterns in the time-series data.
Also, since ACC measures the acceleration of movement, it may not fully capture the complexity of students' physical behaviors during exams.For example, we could analyze the frequency of movements, the intensity of movements, or even the specific types of movements (e.g., tapping, shifting) to see if they correlate with stress levels or performance. This could provide a more nuanced understanding of how physical behavior relates to cognitive states during exams.
Understanding the statistical relationships between physiological measures and academic performance
Stress responses vary significantly between students (SD = 12.3 BPM), requiring personalized approaches to stress management
Average stress peaks occur 18±7 minutes into exams, with 73% of students showing recovery within 15 minutes post-test
Combined biosignals explain 34% of grade variance (R² = 0.34), suggesting significant but not complete predictive capability
Students with moderate stress levels (HR +15-25% from baseline) achieved 12% higher scores than high-stress peers
When students sit down for an exam, it’s not just their knowledge that’s put to the test. Beneath the surface, their bodies are sending signals—tiny physiological messages that can reveal surprising truths about performance.
Let's start with the heart. Heart rate (HR), often thought of as a window into our stress, emerged as a primary indicator during academic exams. Our findings uncovered an unexpected twist: students with a slightly elevated heart rate tended to score higher. Contrary to what you might assume, a racing heart doesn't always mean anxiety is taking over. Sometimes, it means you're alert, engaged, and giving your all.
The top performers, it seems, are those whose hearts are "in the game". In contrast, students who felt too calm with smaller heart rate, didn't fare as well. Perhaps they were too relaxed, or not fully tuned in. Therefore, a touch of nerves can sharpen your focus. If you're too mellow before an exam, a quick walk or some energizing music might just give you the boost you need.
Next, we turned our attention to electrodermal activity (EDA), which is the measure of your skin's response to stress. During exams, EDA often spikes. However, despite the long-established view that EDA is one of the most direct indicator of stress-related responses, our data of exams showed Little Correlation with students' grades. In other words, the complexity of stress in different context remains underdiscovered.
Still, there's prior research stating that some arousal is good, even necessary, for peak performance (Yerkes-Dodson Law), but when it tips into anxiety, performance suffers. Future research could dig deeper, looking not just at averages, but at how EDA rises and falls during especially tough questions—perhaps revealing moments where the pressure gets to be too much.
As stress rises, so does body temperature, if only by a fraction of a degree. Students typically get a little warmer during exams as the evidence of the mind's metabolic demands. Higher temperature indicates higher engagement and thus correlated with higher performance. However, body temperature is not a deterministic factor and the correlation is relatively weak. That's good news since it means that your body's thermostat is working as intended.
Finally, we looked at movement. The accelerometer told us: students who moved around more during exams generally earned higher grades. Different from our intuition, the movement might not be fully a sign of restlessness, distraction, or anxiety. Instead, it might also relate to hard thinking.
However, since the aggregated data does not capture individual patterns in the time series data, teachers and educators might watch for closer studies that captures patterns, stepping in to offer support to students who just can't seem to sit still, perhaps through deep breath or short meditation exercises.
Our bodies whisper clues about how we're coping with academic pressure. A little stress is good when it sharpens our minds and readies us for challenge. Just like the nonnegligible positive correlation between grades and heart rate, sometimes feeling heart beating in the middle of exam could be a good news! But don't get it overboard, prior research has shown that whether it shows up as sweaty palms or restless legs, can cloud our thinking and hold us back.