Study Hack: Why Taking Practice Exams is the Best Way to Conquer Course Material
Your friends and classmates will come up with different questions than you, swap practice exams to cover all possibilities while studying.
Assessing the knowledge that you can quickly and easily summon on-demand, is crucial to planning your study strategy.
Taking practice exams, either from past semesters, or that you have created on your own, is a great way to quickly map out what you know, and what you should really brush up on before test time.
Swapping exams with friends or classmates is a great way to gain new insight.
Your peers can offer different perspectives on the content under study. Maybe they have a new way of phrasing a question that you may not have considered. Perhaps they have made questions on facts that you deemed irrelevant. These are all things to consider as your exams approach. Trading practice exams with your classmates can offer an invaluable sneak peek on what might be on the test.
Take the practice exams closed book, and don’t peak at your notes.
If you constantly rely on a crutch, you will never be able to tell what you can truly recall on your own before the exam is upon you. Taking the practice test without checking into your notes or your textbook will more closely recreate the difficulty of the situation.
If you find yourself struggling, you will have also learned something new. You have learned what areas you need to focus on. Without this work, you will not be able to fully prepare yourself for what you need to study as we lead up to the exam.
You learn more from the answers you got wrong than the ones you got right.
Correcting your exam afterwards will allow you to actually see which questions that you struggled with. You can make an assessment and a plan for how you will incorporate this material into your future study efforts and how much you still have left to accomplish.
Questions that were answered incorrectly despite your confidence in the answer, will offer a unique look into where you went wrong.
Why did you think that the answer was correct?
How far off were you?
What is the actual answer?
How can you amend your current understanding to incorporate this new knowledge?
This is the time you will be most receptive to update this information and you should take advantage.
For this reason, correcting the exam is even more important than taking it in the first place, do not miss out on this opportunity.
Time yourself as you take the practice test.
For best use of this study strategy, you want to recreate the test atmosphere as much as possible. Adding time constraints is a good way to up the ante.
Recreate the exam conditions as accurately as possible. This might include timing yourself, hiding your notes and textbook, or even taking the test in an unfamiliar location.
You will not have all day to ponder the best answer for each of the questions. In real life, sometimes you are still scribbling down answers as the clock ticks down to the final seconds.
Ideally, you will want to aim at being able to complete the exam in about half to 2/3 of the actual exam block.
Professors generally write the exam with this being the ideal amount of time. This will allow extra time for students to ponder and go back and refine their answers. Being able to not only answer the questions correctly but also quickly can make a huge difference in the mark you ultimately receive.
If you can recall with ease you can spend more time elaborating your answers, giving examples or even drawing diagrams to promote your point. If you are rushed, your writing might get sloppy and easy to misinterpret, having an eloquence to your knowledge can be the difference between a letter grade.
Study what is easy, what is hard, and everything in between.
Often the really simple concepts will stick out in our mind along with the extremely difficult ones. This is usually what we focus on during our study time. We want to make sure that we hash out all of the hard work on those difficult topics and will only touch on the simple ones when we are in a rush
Do not forget that there is a whole spectrum of information in between.
These are easily overlooked and forgotten. Writing a practice exam can bring those into the forefront and allow us to see where all the content is on the spectrum and redirect our study efforts accordingly. You may find that the difficult to understand concepts have been reviewed so many times that you actually do understand them with quite a bit of ease and now you can move on and focus on other areas.
