Your exam results may be affected by the room in which you take them.

An unexpected feature of the room where students take their exams could impact their results, a new study suggests: a high ceiling.

Typically, in schools and colleges, students attend classes in small rooms or lecture halls and study alone in regular-sized rooms. But on exam day, due to the large number of people taking the final exams, students are placed in large rooms such as gymnasiums for their final exams.

While this may make sense from a financial and logistical perspective, recent research suggests that high-ceilinged rooms may impact brain activity associated with concentration. Researchers from the University of South Australia and Deakin University investigated this effect by examining real-world data collected from 15,400 undergraduate students across three Australian university campuses between 2011 and 2019, and the ceiling heights of the rooms where they took their exams.

Taking into account factors such as course grades, students’ ages, time of year, subject studied and whether the student had previously taken exams on that subject, the team found that there was a noticeable difference in performance between students sitting in rooms with normal and high ceilings.

“These spaces are often designed for purposes other than exams, such as gymnasiums, exhibitions, events and performances,” Dr. Isabella Bower, lead author of the study, said in a statement. “The key point is that large rooms with high ceilings appear to disadvantage students and we need to understand what brain mechanisms are at play, and whether this affects all students to the same degree.”

This research alone does not clearly determine what caused students’ poorer performance in rooms with higher ceilings.

“A major limitation of this naturalistic retrospective study is that we are unable to determine whether the observed outcome is directly related to the quality of the scale design or whether the differences are due to the indoor environmental parameters provided by the scale,” the team wrote in their paper. “For example, because enlarged gymnasium spaces are often poorly insulated and expensive to air-condition, the observed effect may be due to lower ambient temperature on students, which has been shown to reduce cognitive function in young adults.”

Other factors that may contribute to this include unfamiliarity with the exam room and overcrowding. Cognitive performance has been shown to decline in crowded spaces, for example.

“Finally, the smaller room size may give students more opportunities to cheat,” the team continues. “Although the proctor-to-student ratio is much higher, the student-to-student ratio is lower, which reduces peer monitoring and supervision, which may influence whether a student cheats by smuggling notes.”

However, while we don’t know the mechanism, room size appears to be a partial factor. Previous research by the team placed participants in virtual reality environments that changed the size of the virtual “room” they were in, while electroencephalography (EEG) recorded the response in their brains, revealing that brain activity involved in focusing on difficult tasks increased when participants sat in larger virtual rooms. This research could lead to improvements in exams and tests.

“In Australia, many universities and schools use large indoor spaces for exams to streamline logistics and costs. It is essential to recognise the potential impact of the physical environment on student performance and make adjustments as necessary to ensure all students have an equal chance of success,” Bower added.

“These results will allow us to better design the buildings in which we live and work, so that we can optimize our performance.”

The study is published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology.