Test Taking Tips

Friday, July 31, 2026

Having recently graduated from college I think now is a good time to write down some things I learned about how to succeed in school before I forget it all.

It's tempting to go slow and carefully when taking an exam to avoid making silly mistakes. But my experience is that by going slow, I just end up making the same mistakes slower. So my strategy was to take the exam as quickly as possible. My mindset was, "this is a race and I'm going to finish first". And then, once I'd completed the exam, instead of checking my work, which often results in failing to notice the subtle errors made the first time around, I would just retake the whole exam again without looking at my previous work. That way, I could compare answers and if I got a different answer the second time around, I knew I made a mistake somewhere and could search to find and fix it.

If I got stuck on a question, I would write the problem number on a separate page as a reminder to come back to it later, and just move on to the next problem. This is useful because it often happens that when working on subsequent test questions, I had an "a ha!" moment that helped me solve the earlier problem. Sometimes later questions in the exam contain clues that can help you figure out earlier test questions and sometimes it just helps to give your brain a break from thinking about that question.

My last tip is to treat your brain as a muscle. Muscles need to rest, and so does your brain. Exams take a lot of mental energy and if you spend of all your energy studying hard for the exam right up until the moment the exam begins, then you won't have much energy left over to actually take the exam. So I always tried to rest on exam days until my exams were over, and eat well the day before to have plenty of energy.