How to study for this exam

Answer before you look

The most tested finding in learning research is that trying to produce an answer beats reading the material again. Not recognising it. Not nodding along. Producing it, and being wrong sometimes.

So on every question here, commit to an answer first, even when you’re not sure. The guess isn’t wasted. It’s the part that does the work.

The explanation is the point, not the score

Here’s the finding that should change how you use a question bank. Students who answer questions, get most of them wrong, and don’t read the explanation gain nothing measurable at all. Zero. The questions aren’t the teacher. The explanation is the teacher.

Every question on this site shows you why the right answer is right, why the others fail, and where in the textbook it came from. Read that part. Read it when you got it right, too — getting it right for the wrong reason is exactly what catches people on exam day.

Keep a list of what you got wrong

When you miss a question, press Review later under it. Your account page lists every question you mark that way, with a link back to each one. Marking needs a free account. Without a pass it works on the free sample questions; with a pass it works on every question.

After a practice exam, the result screen shows each question you got wrong, with the answer, the explanation and the book reference, as long as you are within the day’s limit on answers. You get to see that review once. When you leave the page it closes, so mark the ones you want back as you read through them. A quiz result lists your misses too, with a link to open each question. Quizzes and practice exams come with a pass.

Then come back to that list on a later day and try to answer from memory again. Keep going until you can produce it without the page in front of you. When you can, mark it Done, and the quizzes you build will leave it out. In a real college course, students scored “over 10%” higher on the course exam for concepts they studied this way than for concepts they studied their own way. On a test 24 days after the exam, they recalled “over 60%” of the concepts studied this way, against “less than 20%” of the ones studied on their own. It’s the most effective thing on this page.

I’ll be straight with you about what the site doesn’t do. It won’t add a missed question to your list on its own; you press Review later. It won’t bring the list back to you on a schedule; you pick the day. And it doesn’t keep notes, so write down what you missed about each one, on paper or in a note on your phone. The site keeps the question. Your note keeps the reason you got it wrong.

Spread it out, and leave longer gaps than feel right

The same total hours work better across more days. That’s not a claim about working harder. It’s the same work, rearranged.

You won’t be able to feel this working, and that’s the hard part. In one experiment, students learned painters’ styles from paintings shown either spaced apart or bunched together. “78% of the participants did better with spaced presentations” — and 78% still said bunching them together had worked as well or better. Spacing feels worse while you do it, because you keep arriving at material you half forgot. That forgetting is the mechanism, not a sign you’re failing.

Don’t ask me for a schedule. The honest answer is that no specific set of intervals has ever been shown to be the right one, and anyone selling you a day 1 / day 3 / day 7 / day 30 plan is quoting folklore. The one rule that does hold: if you’re unsure how long to leave between passes, leave longer.

Do the domains you dislike

Practising questions in the areas you enjoy does not carry over to the areas you skipped. It really doesn’t. In the research, practising questions on one area gave no dependable boost on material the student had studied but skipped when practising.

Every domain page here shows what share of the real exam that domain carries. Use those numbers. Animal Care and Nursing is 20% of the exam. Communication is 5%. Spend your time in proportion, and go at the domain you keep avoiding.

Work the math on paper

Every math type here gives you fresh numbers each time, so you can’t memorise the answer. Work it on paper and round only at the end.

When you get one wrong, read the worked solution, then draw a new problem of the same type and do it again without looking.

Explain it out loud with the book closed

Pick something you just learned and explain it to a coworker, a classmate, or the dog. The condition that matters is that your notes are closed. When researchers compared explaining from memory against explaining with notes in front of you, only the closed-notes version kept its advantage.

What isn't worth your time

• Rereading your notes. It feels productive because the words get easier every pass, and easy reading feels like knowing. Most students say they reread, but a major review rated it “low utility”: it does “not consistently boost students’ performance.”
• Highlighting as your main method. A small help for memory, no help for understanding, and it takes the place of better work.
• Working out whether you’re a visual or auditory learner. A major review of the research found “virtually no evidence” that matching teaching to a stated preference helps.
• “You remember 10% of what you read and 90% of what you teach.” The earliest known printing of numbers like these is a 1967 trade-magazine article that gave no reference for them.
• Studying with music, if you’re reading. A review of the research found that background music “disturbs the reading process.”

Sleep, briefly

One real finding, from students tracked across a semester: how they slept across the month and the week before a test was linked to their score. How they slept the night before wasn’t. Whatever you do the night before matters less than the weeks that led to it.

The part I can't tell you

I don’t know how many questions is enough.

I can’t tell you this program will raise your score. In the best trial I know of, urology residents who worked through spaced study questions learned that material well, but the gains “did not generalize to higher scores” on their real in-service exam.

What I can tell you is what the material is built on: questions written against the real blueprint, an explanation for every one, and where in the book it came from so you can go read it yourself. The rest is the work, and the work is yours.