My son is in the 2nd grade (8 y/o) and at school, he doesn't have any exams at all yet.
He passed the first stage of a gifted education project, that would greatly help him if he gets into it. The first stage was several questions, but with no fixed time limit, so not a "real" exam.
However, the second stage consists of a real exam, with fixed time limit of about 30 minutes during which he must solve about 10 questions. He has no problem with the questions themselves, and during practice at home he has very few mistakes, however he's really stressed out about the time limit as he never had to do such thing before, and afraid he'll run out of time. At home, whenever we try to simulate the actual exam with the time limit, he gets a total blackout and can't even start.
We tried to explain that several minutes for each question are more than enough to think and find the correct answer, tried to explain he can skip hard questions and solve them later but nothing worked so far.
Any suggestions what else we can do? Would be pity to throw away a great opportunity over something like that.
Update, August 2021: thanks everyone, my son has successfully passed the exams (top 3%) and was accepted to the project.