You arrive before the commission with weeks of notes on you, worn highlighters, concept maps, connections rehearsed in your head while brushing your teeth. Then you sit down, they ask you to start and your brain opens all the windows at once, like an old computer that decides to crash just as you were saving the file. The problem of the final exam often lies there. You’ve studied, but your voice runs, your hands look for a place, your gaze lowers, the first sentence comes out wrong and from that moment on you feel like you’re less prepared than you really are.
In 2026 the conversation has an even more evident communicative weight. The Ministry of Education and Merit has indicated an oral centered on four disciplines, with an evaluation that also looks at the ability to argue, connect, tell one’s path and show awareness. Ergo: knowing the topics remains fundamental, but the way in which you manage to bring them out also counts. And this part can be trained, without becoming Instagram-ready motivational speakers.
The body speaks before you
The first mistake is treating the oral exam as a purely mental matter. Repeat, read, underline, repeat again. All right, up to a certain point. When you have to speak in front of someone, the body also comes into play. And the body, when it feels evaluation, can become a drama queen: faster heart, dry throat, shoulders up, shortness of breath, hands that suddenly seem like two objects lent by a neighbor.
Research on public speaking anxiety, i.e. the anxiety of speaking in public, has shown for years how this fear can influence school, university and work. A recent review published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience describes it as a widespread difficulty, capable of affecting performance and self-perception. If you convince yourself that you are awkward, unprepared, ridiculous, you risk actually speaking as if you were.
Here posture, gesture and voice come into play. A 2023 study tested a program based on body awareness, simulation, use of gesture and anxiety management in public speaking. Participants showed a reduction in perceived anxiety and also in physiological response, such as heart rate. In the oral exam it is therefore better to train concrete things: feet supported, breathing before starting, hands free from the life jacket pen, gaze passing from one person to another.
The closed posture communicates fatigue even before words. The empty sentences give the idea of a confused thought even when the thought is there. Speaking too quickly, to immediately free yourself from anxiety, often produces the opposite effect: the commission struggles to follow and you lose control. Better to start more slowly, even with a slightly clumsy first sentence, as long as it’s well-breathed. Nobody expects a Professor Barbero-style conference on Montale, photosynthesis or the 1929 crisis. We need a person who can stay inside what he says.
Repeat reading is deceiving
Another classic mistake is to mistake familiarity for preparation. Reread a page ten times and everything seems clear to you. Of course it seems clear to you: it’s there in front of you. The trouble comes when you close the notebook and have to reconstruct the reasoning on your own. At that point the holes appear, the half-finished sentences, the connections that in the head seemed like bridges but were instead wet wooden walkways.
Writing summaries can help, as long as you use them well. The summary works when it forces you to choose what really matters, remove the superfluous and reconstruct the thread in your own words. If it becomes the fair copy of the book, little changes: it is a passive revision with better handwriting. For the oral exam it is best to close the notes, write a short list from memory, check the gaps and then say it orally. That’s where the study finally resembles the exam.
The so-called testing effect, studied among others by Henry Roediger and Jeffrey Karpicke in a work published in Psychological Science, shows that active information retrieval helps memory more than simple rereading. To prepare for the final exam, therefore, you need to try speaking without a net. Even bad, especially at the beginning. The first simulation may seem like a Greek tragedy with drunk actors, but that’s exactly where you understand what holds up and what collapses.
The most useful advice, even if it seems like something straight out of an old diction course, is to register. Two minutes is enough. Listening to it again makes you want to move to Mars, okay, but it works: you hear the “that is”, the “practically”, the endless sentences that start from Leopardi and arrive at a dead end without passing through the start.
Training like this also helps with cutting. One of the worst mistakes in the oral exam is wanting to say everything: program, dates, definitions, things marked with yellow marker because “they’re sure to ask for this one”. The result is a bloated speech, where information steps on each other’s toes and the commission begins to mentally look for the emergency exit. Much better to choose a thread: open, two or three solid steps, clear connection, simple closure. The rest can come in if asked.
Anxiety takes up space
When anxiety rises, memory becomes more difficult. It happens because worrying thoughts consume cognitive resources. The literature on test anxiety has repeatedly linked the fear of evaluation to working memory, that is, the mental space we use to hold information together, reason, respond, correct ourselves as we speak.
A work published in the Journal of Microbiology & Biology Education, taking up previous studies on exam anxiety, explains precisely this mechanism: anxious thoughts take up space in working memory and reduce the capacity available for the task. And in the oral exam the task is already challenging enough without adding the internal karaoke of “now I’m wrong, now I get stuck, now they judge me, now I forget everything”.
A simple gesture can help: write down your fears before revising or before the test. A study published in Science observed that a short expressive writing exercise before an important test can especially help the most anxious students. Just write down what scares you: forgetting a connection, blushing, making a silent scene, seeming less intelligent. Once written, that noise remains less muddy in the head.
Breath can also help, without selling it as a magic potion. A meta-analysis published in Scientific Reports found promising effects of breathing practices on stress and anxiety, while urging caution. Before entering: shoulders down, slow inhale, longer exhale, a few cycles. The program remains the same. The body, at least, avoids fire mode.
Silence is not a failure
Among the most underestimated errors is the fear of the void. That fraction of a second in which the word is slow to arrive and the student convinces himself that it’s over, that the commission has already understood everything, that “hermeticism” has remained stuck behind his forehead. In reality, a short pause seems much longer to those who experience it than to those who listen.
That void can be inside an answer. Just breathe, keep your gaze present and resume with a simple sentence: “I’ll rephrase”, “I’ll start from the context”, “I’ll take a second to sort out the connection”. Even a light joke can help, if it comes naturally: a half smile and “I’m creating a moment of suspense” can ease the tension a little. It must remain a spontaneous thing, said once. If it becomes a mask, the irony stops lightening and begins to show anxiety.
A short pause is much better than a burst of “that is”, “practically”, “then” thrown in to fill the air. The committee also listens to how a student manages to get back on his feet after a small stumble.
Another mistake is to experience every question as an attack. The commission can interrupt, ask for clarification, move the discussion. Sometimes it means there is material to work with. Training with someone who interrupts, asks “why?”, “in what sense?”, “can you give an example?”. At first it’s annoying, then it becomes useful: it forces you to move away from the learned answer and see if the argument really stands up. If you can explain it in your own words, give an example and simplify it without emptying it, it means you are handling it.
Preparing means really trying
The best way to avoid communication errors is to stop treating communication as an accessory. The oral simulation must be done as it will be in the exam: realistic time, no notes in front, someone who listens and returns two precise observations. “Good” or “bad” are as useful as a punctured umbrella. Better: you speak too fast, you lose the thread, you always use the same word, you don’t pay much attention to the listener, the closure goes away.
From there it is corrected. One thing at a time. First the rhythm, then the order, then the connections, then the voice. Expecting to fix everything together only creates more anxiety. Preparation remains the basis, of course. But the way that preparation comes out of the mouth makes the difference between a full but confused answer and a more essential, clearer, more credible answer.
Before the oral exam it is also worth studying this: how to start, how to breathe, how to use a pause, how to answer a lateral question, how to close without evaporating. They seem like small things. When examined, they are often the ones who hold the voice together.
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