Test Prep Trick #4: Practice?!

Happy Monday! We're on to Test Prep Strategy #4 today.

The best way to prepare for any test is to burn through hundreds of questions the week before the test. If you post good practice scores, you’re all but guaranteed to post a good score when the real intellectual bullets are flying.

This is what most people who prepare for a standardized test think of when they think of “studying for” the test. Get a book full of questions, lock yourself in your room, and plow through until your scores improve. This method works as often as reading a dictionary from cover to cover helps to prepare someone to speak conversational French in Paris.

Which is to say, occasionally (but only by accident).

A few years ago, in the week leading up to a standardized test, I agonized over this method with a student whose parents were firm believers in the Bomb Shelter Theory. On top of his normal obligations as a student and contributing member of society, he was expected to spend at least two hours every night bulldozing his way through question after question, passage after agonizing passage. By Wednesday he was already perilously close to his breaking point, but he also knew that he was already past the Point of No Return.

Despite his best efforts, this student’s test score did not improve.

I’ve heard this story over and over again in the past fifteen years. Some kids are actually afraid to admit that their scores didn’t improve after weeks of bulk testing, because they think their failure exposes a personal weakness. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

We’ve all heard the phrase “practice makes perfect,” and some of us have even heard the much more elegant update to that phrase, “practice makes permanent.”

If I may make another revision to this familiar saying,

Prudent prep produces proficiency.

The old “practice” model relies on immersion and volume to produce either “perfection” or “permanence,” neither of which mean a whole lot when you’re preparing for a test that has only coincidental application to real-world problem solving.

The “prudent prep” model emphasizes efficiency, making the most out of an optimized amount of questions on the road to test fluency. Once you’re fluent in the language of the standardized test, your natural abilities will be able to shine through much more easily.

Proficiency means that even though you will not be able to read Voltaire’s Candide in 17th century French, you will at least be able to order a meal at a French restaurant and hold a conversation with your waiter about the wine selection without sounding like a stereotypical foreigner (speaking louder and more slowly in your native language). 

Improvement on standardized tests happens when you begin to understand not just how to get the right answers, but how to identify and eliminate wrong answers. For this reason, you can practice for as little as twenty minutes a day over the course of a few weeks and see your scores shoot up the charts.

It’s the difference between using Pop-A-Shot and targeted ball drills to become a better jump shooter. You may get better at throwing non-regulation sized balls into a non-regulation basket, but those skills don’t translate to the actual basketball court.

An ideal program involves a full week of practice, careful analysis and internalization of wrong (and guessed right) answers, and then a session or two with a skilled professional to acquire new skills and/or hone the skills you worked on during the week to a finer point.

Of course, that’s where I come in! If you’re tired of seeing your test taker endure frustrating marathon practice sessions, and you’re willing to try a new way, send me a message! Test prep season is in full swing, and I’m taking on a few more new students for the next few tests (through October).

Thanks for reading! Tomorrow I will be writing about Trick #5 and the "one size fits all" myth behind test prep!