Having taller ceilings in the exam hall can lead to poorer test scores! Here’s how

Have you ever found yourself staring at the impossibly high ceiling of a vast exam hall, wondering if it was designed for educational purposes or to test your ability to focus in a space large enough to host a rock concert? Well, it turns out those lofty ceilings might be more than just an architectural quirk — they could be affecting your exam performance.

Sifting through data from 15,400 undergraduate students between 2011-2019 across three Australian university campuses, researchers attempted to understand how the height of exam hall ceilings correlated with student performance. After adjusting for individual differences and prior coursework performance, they found students fared worse in rooms with soaring ceilings.

But why do lofty ceilings matter?

Study researcher Isabella Bower suggests it might be the sheer scale of the room or other sneaky factors like student density or shoddy insulation, leading to brain-melting temperature swings and air quality issues.

"These spaces are often designed for purposes other than examinations, such as gymnasiums, exhibitions, events and performances," explains Bower. "The key point is that large rooms with high ceilings seem to disadvantage students and we need to understand what brain mechanisms are at play, and whether this affects all students to the same degree."

To understand the issue, the researchers strapped VR headsets onto the participants and used electroencephalography (EEG) to monitor their brain waves. The participants were exposed to rooms of varying sizes while controlling for pesky variables like temperature, lighting, and noise. They also tracked heart rate, breathing, and sweat levels to see if participants could subconsciously sense changes in their environment.

Dropping brain activity

The results? Simply sitting in a larger room sparked brain activity linked to struggling with difficult tasks. This led to a lightbulb moment: maybe trying to concentrate in a massive gymnasium really does tank performance.

In Australia, as well as India, many universities use colossal indoor spaces for exams to keep things efficient and cost-effective. Therefore, it is important to recognise the impact of physical environments on student performance and tweak our designs to give everyone a fair chance at a good score.

As we continue to mould the buildings where we live, work, and cram for finals, it’s time to consider how even ceiling height can mess with our minds. So, the next time you bomb an exam in an echoing hall, you can probably get away with not blaming your study habits — just blame the ceiling instead!

The findings of this research have been published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology and can be accessed here.