Study: Binge Drinking Affects Students’ Mood, But Not Test-Taking Ability

College students who drank heavily the night before an exam performed surprisingly well on tests the next day, even though binge drinking was found to affect their mood, attention, and reaction times, according to Boston University and Brown University researchers.

Sify News reported March 23 that researcher Jonathan Howland of the Boston University School of Public Health and colleagues found that getting drunk the night before a test didn’t impair performance on exams that required utilization of long-term memory or recall of recently learned material.

However, Howland and colleages noted, “We do not conclude… that excessive drinking is not a risk factor for academic problems. It is possible that a higher alcohol dose would have affected next-day academic test scores. Moreover, test-taking is only one factor in academic success. Study habits, motivation and class attendance also contribute to academic performance; each of these could be affected by intoxication.”

The controlled study involved 193 college students who were given either alcoholic beer or nonalcoholic beer and then took a test the next morning. Both groups performed comparably on the test.

The study appears in the April 2010 issue of the journal Addiction.