Study: Late-night drinking no problem for test-takers

Thirsty Thursdays have never looked better, according to a new Boston University School of Public Health study released Tuesday that says binge drinking the night before a test does not affect a student’s performance.

Conducted in partnership with Brown University and set to be featured in the April 2010 edition of the journal Addiction, the study found that participants who consumed beer the night before being given an academic test scored the same as subjects who consumed non-alcoholic beer.

Over a four-day period, the 193 student participants were given either an alcoholic or non-alcoholic beverage. The students who received alcoholic beverages drank until they had a blood-alcohol level of 0.12. The next day, participants took practice versions of the Graduate Record Exam and a mock quiz on a lecture they received the previous afternoon.

Whether they were sober or inebriated the previous night, all of the students received similarly high scores on both exams.

However, BUprofessor and coordinator of the study Jonathan Howland said the study only examined alcohol’s effect on test-taking ability, not academic ability as a whole.

“We didn’t look at whether or not learning was affected under hangover conditions,” he said. “We looked at whether test-taking was affected, so it may be that learning was affected even if you got to class, if you had a really bad headache or something. If you felt lousy you might not be alert; you might not be processing the information as efficiently.”

Howland explained there are other factors that go into a student’s performance on a test after a night of heavy drinking &- for example, a person’s mental readiness for a non-test situation.

“There are a lot of ways in which heavy drinking can affect academic performance other than test taking,” he said. “For example, you could be asleep when you should be in class, and then you wouldn’t learn something, right?”

The purpose of the study was not to encourage students to binge drink the night before a test in hopes that they would be unaffected by the alcohol, Howland said.

“The message is not that binge drinking doesn’t affect academic performance,” he said. “It’s that we looked at one aspect of academic performance and we didn’t see anything. We’re not saying that drinking doesn’t affect academic performance; we’re saying that it didn’t affect [test-taking].”

There are a number of studies that show that the day after heavy drinking, occupational performance is affected, Howland said.

He said his previous research has also shown consuming large quantities of alcohol would have effects on “performance dimensions” the next day. Mood, attention and reaction time could still all be affected by the student’s activities the previous night.

Some BU students, like College of Communication freshman Elizabeth Olenski, said the study’s findings would only encourage regular drinkers that their actions are not detrimental to their academic success.

“I think it has to have some kind of effect,” she said. “When you have a hangover and you sleep until noon it has to affect your studying just because it’s taking so many hours out of your day.”

College of Arts and Sciences freshman Howard Terry said he does not believe that the student’s ability to scrutinize questions would be unaffected.

“I definitely think binge drinking the night before a test would be detrimental to your test taking. It would affect your ability to analyze anything,” he said.

CAS freshman Ridhima Sharma said that if a student is drinking the night before a test, he or she probably has more to worry about than schoolwork.

“If you’re binge drinking frequently, there’s probably some sort of alcohol-related problem,” she said. “So when you’re taking a test after having been binge drinking, you’re probably thinking of drinking and not focusing on the test.”

Staff writer Meaghan Beatley contributed reporting to this article.