Why You Should Take Graduate School Entry Practice Exams

By Madison White on August 19, 2016

If you’re planning to take a graduate school entrance exam, you’ve probably learned that preparedness is key to success in nearly every facet of life. Especially in college, the best way to do well and perform at your peak is to know exactly what to expect.

Finding out how to prepare for graduate entrance exams can be tricky and confusing, even more so when amidst your regular study schedule, jobs, and life. However, if your first step to graduate exam success is taking a practice exam of whatever test it is, you are already on the right track.

So many benefits can be gained by taking a practice test; here are five of them.

1. Narrow down information.

Whether your graduate entry test is general like the GRE or specific like the MCAT, your brain holds way more knowledge than it needs to know for the test. Frequently, standardized tests like these will test your knowledge in a very constrained subject or manner.

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Taking a practice exam will help you realize if you need to know technical formulas, big ideas, abstract thinking, or a combination of them all. Therefore, if you go in without preparation and only know general concepts, you may be out of luck on a procedure-based exam.

A practice exam obviously won’t give you all of the exact information, but it will help you narrow your knowledge into comprehensible and easily studied material prior to the test.

2. Work in time constraints.

For some of us who like to take our time, nothing is worse than standardized time constraints. You may be ace when it comes to knowing all of the information, but put a timer on you and all your anxiety fries your brain. This is a death wish for any test taker.

Sadly, I wish there was a quick fix for dealing with time constraints, but the only real option is to practice with them. By getting yourself used to answering similar questions in a rapid-fire manner, this trains your brain to do the same thing while taking the exam. Practice exams are instrumental in overcoming this and excelling.

3. Refresh your memory.

When you take graduate exams, you’ll obviously be near the end of your degree. This means most of your knowledge has become very specialized. However, many of these exams won’t just test you on recent knowledge, but on what you’ve acquired over your entire college career. This means you may have forgotten many of the basics you learned nearly four years ago.

Especially when taking generalized tests like the GRE, you’ll have to revisit areas you haven’t been taught in a while. A practice exam will help you realize which areas you have forgotten most about and which ones you don’t need as much work on. If you attempt to study without a practice exam, you may forget whole subjects altogether which could be a huge detriment to your score.

4. Judge your outcome.

Besides showing you what to work on and managing your time, a practice test is also a good predictor of how you will do. Often, without a practice test, taking an exam will either make us falsely believe that we’ve aced it or failed it.

A practice test will give you the most accurate reading of your potential test outcome before actually taking it. This way, if you aren’t happy beforehand, you can actively take steps to improve. If you wait until after you’ve taken the exam, you’ll have to pay all over again to retake it. Knowing your likely outcome will prevent you from future anxiety or disappointment.

5. Take active steps to improve.

One of the most important reasons to take a practice exam is that it means you are actively taking steps to improve your scores. Often, when tackling a large task such as these exams, students fail to know where to start and then fail to start at all. This means their lack of preparation and procrastination can seriously injure their scores.

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However, taking a practice exam, and even getting a terrible first score, means you’ve already determined what you need to study in order to get better before the real thing. It is so much easier to prepare for something when you have small steps to take toward improvement. A practice exam is a great first step to make.

While practice exams may not be the easiest or most enjoyable way to spend a few hours, the time you take to prepare now will result in a huge payoff. You’ll save yourself more time and money when you score higher on your first round of test taking rather than end up disappointed and frustrated about taking it again. Your own determination this far has gotten you through your undergraduate degree, so don’t stop your success here!

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