Most of these “strategies” are common sense; many of them you already know. But we’re including them anyway because it’s amazing how a timed test can warp and mangle common sense. If you review anything in the minutes before taking the test, review these strategies.
General Hint 1: Be Calm
The best way to do poorly on a test is to psych yourself out. Physics in particular calls for cool, systematic thinking: if your mind starts thrashing about wildly, it will have a hard time settling on the right answers. There are a number of preventative measures you can take, beginning weeks, or even months, before the test date. Buying this book was a good start: it’s reassuring to see all the you’ll need to ace the test in a compact, manageable form. But there are a number of other things you ought to keep in mind:
Study in advance.
If you’ve studied at regular intervals leading up to the test, and don’t do all your cramming the night before, the will sit more securely in your mind.
Be well rested.
Get a good night’s sleep on the two nights leading up to the test. If you’re frazzled or wired, you’re going to have a harder time buckling down and concentrating when it really counts.
Come up for air.
Don’t assume that the best way to take an hour-long test is to spend the full hour nose-to-nose with the test questions. If you lift your head occasionally, look about you, and take a deep breath, you’ll return to the test with a clearer mind. You’ll lose maybe ten seconds of your total test-taking time, but you’ll be all the more focused for the other fifty-nine minutes and fifty seconds.
General Hint 2: Fill in Your Answers Carefully
This is very important. People make mistakes filling in their answer sheets and it can cost them big-time. This slip up occurs most frequently after you skip a question. If you left question 43 blank, and then unthinkingly put the answer to question 44 into row 43, you could start a long, painful chain of wrong answers. Don’t do this.
Some test prep books advise that you fill in your answer sheet five questions at a time rather than one at a time. Some suggest that you fill out each oval as you answer the question. We think you should fill out the answer sheet in whatever way feels most natural to you, but make sure you’re careful while doing it. In our opinion, the best way to ensure that you’re being careful is to talk to yourself: as you figure out an answer in the test booklet and transfer it over to the answer sheet ovals, say to yourself: “Number 23, B. Number 24, E. Number 25, A.”
General Hint 3: Pace Yourself
At the very least, aim to look at every question on the test. You can’t afford to lose points because you didn’t have the time to look at a question you could have easily answered. You can spend an average of forty-eight seconds on each question, though you’ll probably breeze through some in ten seconds and dwell on others for two minutes. Knowing how to pace yourself is a critical skill—and these three guidelines should help:
