Primary factor: Is your test timeframe determined by a program or admissions deadline?
If you have a limited, preset timeframe due to a looming admissions deadline or program (such as a pipeline or early decision) requirement, you’ll need to practice test as a temperature check if you haven’t taken one yet or taken one within the last few weeks.
If you have a broader time frame, you should consider prepping according to your known weaknesses and rusty knowledge areas first and using multiple practice tests at regular intervals to track progress and use the data to strategically plan each round of prepping between practice tests.
How early should you take a practice test?
Practice tests have multiple purposes and benefits. Don’t view a practice test as something that needs to be passed or a certain score to be achieved, waiting until you feel “ready”. You may never truly feel ready, and we need data from the practice test to know where to put the most time and effort in our prep. A practice test is a measure along the way, not a crystal ball that will definitively predict (or limit) your final exam score. Use it as a tool, as a good carpenter or crafter uses a level or tape measure, before and at multiple intervals during a project. A crafter or carpenter isn’t afraid of or hesitant to use the tape measure; shift your frame of mind to see practice tests like as a helpful tool that doesn’t define us but helps us plan, adjust, and course-correct as needed to reach our final goal.
If you have several months of prep time and you’re aware of specific content that is rusty or you didn’t cover in undergraduate courses, take up to one month to address those content areas first, then consider taking your first practice test to get the big picture.
If you’re not clear on what you don’t know or have forgotten, go ahead and start with a practice test to determine this information and be able to create a data-informed plan.
How to interpret test results and turn your data into a personalized prep strategy
Step 1: Look at your overall (superscore) and section scores to determine which exam sections need the most work.
Plan to work on the weakest exam section first, or to allocate more time for it in daily or weekly study. This is strategizing to pull up the weaker areas while also gaining overall.
Step 2: Analyze your score report at the question level.
Time is often a key factor during prep, and we may have to prioritize how to spend it. Analyzing our incorrects is much higher yield overall than going through ALL questions.
Why? Shot-in-the-dark guesses that are correct are fairly infrequent. Corrects result when we knew the content well and we processed the question in a way that we understood and met the objective, or we knew ENOUGH about the content to put the pieces together and choose the best answer based on what we knew. That’s not truly guessing; it’s still an application of knowledge.
A very small percentage of our corrects involve knowledge gaps or test approach issues to identify, so it can take a lot of time to get very little needed information.
On the contrary, when we miss a question, there is nearly always a reason that we missed it, which might be a content gap, misreading or misinterpreting the question itself, or doubting ourselves and changing our answer. A high percentage of our incorrects involve knowledge gaps or test approach issues to identify so we address a lot of needed information or skills in a relatively short time frame, hence a higher yield.
Consider using a template such as this one to analyze your missed questions and label the source of the problem, whether unknown content or a test approach issue. Issues in test approach, such as rushing, missing key details, overthinking, and doubting ourselves, are a matter of thinking and behavior and will continue to get in the way of answering correctly, even in situations where we do know the necessary content.
Step 3: Address needed content and strategies by working through this prep course textbook.
You can jump to a particular exam section’s chapter first or do a bit of different exam sections’ chapters daily, depending on what the content priorities are.
Work on any thinking and test behavior issues you’ve identified by implementing psych strategies as you do practice questions in each section.
Here are several common thinking and test behavior issues with a strategy to implement:
Issue 1: Rushing or taking too long on some questions.
Make a table of “mile markers” that show where you should be in the questions/passages and on the clock, such as the one pictured.
Mile marker table example
Issue 2: Missing key words/phrases or details, misreading
Use a wet-erase page or whiteboard to jot down short forms of key words. This primes the brain to seek out those points and you’re less likely to miss them. While you can use the highlighting feature built into the exam, it’s very easy to overhighlight and this is counterproductive, so the jotting down option tends to work better for overhighlighters.
Issue 3: Changing to the incorrect answer or choosing the wrong of the two you’ve narrowed it down to.
Recognize where your thinking patterns are leaning toward doubting/second-guessing yourself, which is usually the root of this issue.
Never change to/lean toward an answer choice that’s unfamiliar, JUST BECAUSE you don’t know it. Only choose the unfamiliar one if you’ve eliminated all other choices based on logic (pure process of elimination.
Use what you DO know to put together pieces logically and stick with it, even if you’re not totally sure of the answer. An unsure “this mostly makes sense” always beats the “I don’t know what that is” option.
