When preparing for your boards, bar exam, or entrance exam, we recommend you start with an assessment of your knowledge base. Determining your strengths and weaknesses as you begin to prepare for your exam is crucial in maximizing the small amount of time you have to review several semesters of content.

Our assessments serve to do more than just tell you what you know and what you don’t know. They also help you practice exam-style questions so that you get acclimated to the testing environment. Learning how to test is just as important as knowing what’s on the test.

In all standardized testing, there is an assumption of knowledge that each student must have in order to do well on the exam. As you go from high school to college to grad school, the amount of knowledge you are required to know grows exponentially. The first part in understanding the test you’re about to take is ensuring that you have studied sufficiently to adequately answer all questions.

The second and equally important part of preparing for an exam is to understand how test writers construct the questions.To do this, we recommend you examine all answers – correct and incorrect answers. Understanding why an answer is correct and why the other answers are distractors gives an insight into the mind of the test writers. Eventually, a pattern emerges that allows you to eliminate impossible or improbable answers thereby increasing the odds of you getting the right answer, even when you don’t know the answer.

Crucial to doing well on your exam is managing your time. Unfortunately, too many students find themselves at the end of a section of a test with very little time and way too many questions left to answer. Why does this happen? Because most students prepare for the exam by reviewing the content and practicing taking test questions without practicing their timing.

How do we practice our timing? It’s pretty simple. For every exam, there is a student guide that tells you how many questions are in each section and how much time you have for that section. It’s a simple math problem to determine the amount of time you have for each question in each section.

Once you have determined the amount of time you have for each question on each section, you need to set a timer for each set of practice questions you do. Stick with the timer and stop when the timer goes off. Answer why each question is correct and why each incorrect answer is a distractor to help you understand how the test writers think but make sure the timer is ALWAYS present. Eventually, you will develop an innate sense of timing for your exam which will force you not to linger too long on any one question.

Be sure to set a strategy for easy questions and hard questions. It’s usually more efficient to go through the easy questions first and mark the more difficult question for later to ensure you give the maximum amount of time you need to deduce an answer.