Focus on Low Hanging Fruit

Reviewing practice tests is something that students seem to almost universally dislike.  Once a practice test has been completed, many students would prefer to move to a new task or assignment, as opposed to revisit one they feel they’ve already completed.  While I can relate to that sentiment, it’s vital that you not give in to it. Effective practice test review is arguably the most important part of standardized test prep.  Given its importance, I’m going to dedicate two posts to practice test review. This post is going to discuss the high-level objectives of practice test review; the next one will get into the nitty-gritty details.  

One major mistake that students make when they review a practice test is that they spend more time and energy reviewing the questions they really didn’t know how to solve rather than the questions that they did know how to solve but got wrong anyway.  This makes sense when you consider how many high school teachers score their exams. Many teachers give partial credit for questions depending on how close you were to getting the question right. If the only mistake you made was adding a 5 instead of subtracting one, you will probably get most of the points allotted to that question.  However, if you have absolutely no idea how to solve the problem, you aren’t going to get any points. In this situation, the, prioritizing the questions that you received the fewest points for is obviously the smart move if you want to see improvement on your next assessment.

However, on the SAT and ACT, there is no partial credit.  You lose the same number of points for every wrong answer, regardless of how close you were to finding the right one.  Because of that, the primary focus of your practice test review should be on the questions that you knew how to get right but didn’t and on the questions that you got right but that took more than the average amount of time you’re allotted per question.  Finding ways to avoid careless mistakes will almost certainly require less time and energy than fixing your major content issues. Additionally, figuring out how to solve the questions you got right in more efficient ways should be doable and will free up more time for you to revisit the questions you weren’t sure how to solve at first.  In my experience, the best SAT/ACT performers almost never make careless errors in questions they know how to solve and typically are able to solve easy and moderate questions in well under the allotted time per question. Your goal should be to do the same!