How to Study using Practice Tests
The study strategy you should be using to score higher in your exams
Students always seem to ask me how I actually use practice tests as my main study strategy to rank 3rd in the Physician Licensure Exam (PLE) and 1st in my Internal Medicine board exam (PSBIM).
And this post is my attempt to distill the entire process, broken down into 4 parts:
Why should you include doing practice tests as part of your study strategy for exams?
Where can you find practice tests?
What is a practice test?
A step-by-step walkthrough of how to approach a practice test
So feel free to skip around to find the one that interests you.
So, with that, let’s dive in.
🤔 Part 1: Why should you do practice tests?
The huge problem you probably have when you’re in med school is there’s an overwhelming amount of study material that you have to cover in a short amount of time.
And using passive study techniques like rereading, highlighting, and summarizing notes would not help you with that.
But if you use more effective study strategies like active recall (i.e., practice tests), you’ll be more likely to remember more information for longer periods of time.
Personally, when I was in elementary and high school, I was also taught to reread my books and notes multiple times if I wanted to memorize concepts and topics.
As a result, I was always at the bottom of my class.
But after learning about practice tests and unlocking its benefits, it was life-changing.
I was finally able to pinpoint my weak areas and my knowledge gaps so I poured more effort and time into those instead of trying to study everything in the textbook which is virtually impossible.
📍 Part 2: Where can you find practice tests?
There are a lot of ways you can find practice tests.
One of those is simply by asking your upperclassmen because most of them have practice tests in the form of past exams that they used to help them get through the year level that you’re currently in.
Another way is to look for board review books such as the Board Review Series (BRS) of books like BRS Physiology which has end-of-chapter questions and a 100-item comprehensive exam at the end of the it complete with detailed explanations.
If you’re studying for the USMLE, you can pay for a subscription to UWorld or AMBOSS to get access to their question banks.
And if you’re preparing for the Australian medical exams or the AMC, you can subscribe to MplusX or Amedex.
📝 Part 3: What is a practice test?
The parts of a practice test are the question stem and a set of possible answers below.
And the questions can either be those that only rely on simple memorization like:
“What are the earliest involved joints in Rheumatoid Arthritis?“
Or those which are called “two-step questions” which are questions that require several intermediate mental steps before arriving at the correct answer.
Here’s an example:
A 70-year-old man comes to the clinic with a 3-month history of lower urinary tract symptoms. On digital rectal examination, the physician palpated a hard, nodular, and irregular prostate. In which zone of the prostate gland is this most likely located?
A. Peripheral zone B. Central zone C. Transition zone D. Midcentral zone
As you can see in this question stem, it doesn’t explicitly state the patient’s diagnosis. It just states the clinical findings that point to a possible diagnosis of prostate cancer.
So, you first have to make the diagnosis of prostate cancer in your head as an intermediate step, so that you can choose the correct answer among the options.
But whatever the type of question is, if you don’t use it the right way, it can work against you rather than working for you.
👨🏫 Part 4: Step-by-step Walkthrough
When answering practice tests, you can do it in two ways:
Do simulated exams where you set a timer and then you finish all the 100 questions first before you look at the answer explanations for each of the questions.
Doing practice questions this way where you simulate the exam conditions makes you familiar with the feeling of taking the exam, so you’ll learn how to deal with the anxiety that comes with taking it under time pressure.
The second way of answering practice tests is to answer one question (again under time pressure) but this time, instead of going to the next question, you will look at the letter of the answer right away and see if you got it right or wrong and then you read the explanations before you move down to the next question.
This second method makes use of the benefits of immediate feedback to help consolidate or solidify your memory of the topic.
But you shouldn’t stop there.
Because there is only a small chance that this exact same question will come out in your exam.
So, instead of trying to remember the exact question, set of options or the answer to that question,
What you can do is to think to yourself:
“What are some of the other ways that this question can be asked the next time around?”
“How can the other options be constructed into questions themselves?”
This will deepen your understanding of the topic so that you know the ins and outs of it.
So that if the exam questions will not exactly be the same as those in your practice tests (and they usually won’t be), you will still know how to reason your way to the correct answer.
How do you do this?
After seeing and reading about the explanations. You have to then go to exploring why the other options are wrong.
For example, why are options A and B even included among the options.
Maybe because those 2 concepts are closely related to the answer, but sometimes not at all.
So, the next thing to do is to find out what those options are.
What they are and and how do they fit into the current general idea or topic and how is it similar or different to the correct answer.
The goal here is to not get the correct answer every single time because that could actually frustrate you more than it could motivate you.
Instead, you can just tell yourself that your goal is to be less wrong each time that the same question, same topic, or concept is asked in your exam.
⚙️ Lets go to this sample question:
What nerve gets injured if there’s a fracture in the midshaft of the humerus?
A. Radial nerve B. Axillary nerve C. Median nerve D. Ulnar nerve
The answer here is the radial nerve.
And if we look into the table above from the book First Aid for the USMLE Step 1, aside from damaging the radial nerve, it can also involve the deep brachial artery.
Now after going through this, you go a step further.
Start with asking yourself about related concepts around the topic of upper limb fractures with their corresponding nerve and artery involvement.
What if the question asks:
If the posterior circumflex artery is injured, what part of the upper limb is most likely injured?
The answer here would be the surgical neck the humerus.
And this is the exact way I go through practice tests as my main study strategy.
Because it helps me with making connections among multiple topics and more importantly, it differentiates them so I will less likely get confused the next time around
And aside from being a med student before, I’m also a med school teacher right now and this is exactly the method that other teachers and I use to create new sets of questions from past exams from previous years.
And that’s it!
If you made it this far, I greatly appreciate you for taking the time to read it.
If you have any questions about the things I talked about, please hit me up via Twitter DM, I'd love to hear from you. — @AvilloKarl
Photo by Andy Barbour
Thank you for this doc!