Practice tests are often seen as a panacea for midterms and finals studying. While they’re useful to practice test taking skills, they aren’t representative of “studying” the underlying material.

Advice

• When you take a practice test…actually take it.
  • Set aside the prescribed test time
  • Take it in a quiet place
  • Only use the materials you’ll be allowed in the actual exam
  • Most importantly do not look at the solutions until you written some answer down
• Just because you solved a problem on a practice exam does not show that you know how to identify that class of problem on an exam.
  • When you see a problem on a practice exam, try to brainstorm variations of problems you might see on the real exam.
  • Would you know how to solve the question if it were asked in a different way?
  • What if they included this variable, but not this other variable? Etc.
• If you get problems wrong, identify why you got them wrong.
  • What about the problem led you down the wrong solution?
  • What sort of strategy can you make to avoid that wrong path?
  • How might you remember this mistake next time you have a similar problem?
• While you can certainly ask Professors/TAs/PMs for advice on what extra material you might use to study do not ask for extra practice exams to be released.
  • Not only is it a huge amount of work to design an even-handed exam…but taking practice exams is NOT the only way of studying for an exam
  • See if you can identify extra problems in the slides/lectures
  • Try to explain one of the topics covered on the exam to your roommate
  • Try to write your own questions based on the ones you see in the available practice exam