Best Practices for Standardized Testing

Standardized testing is difficult, even for those students who take tests at school regularly. In the first place, school testing is different since the multiple assignments and exams act as a safety net, whereas standardized tests are a hit or miss and secondly, because of the way standardized tests are structured, having more knowledge may not always be helpful.

Still, if you want to study abroad, you can’t escape these tests, so here are some of the best practices you can follow when taking one of these tests to ensure a Good Score.

Highlighting Important Parts

One of the ways you can help yourself on a test is by underlining all the words that are essential to a question. By doing this, you make it easier for yourself to hunt for the answer. Since these tests are Multiple-Choice questions, you can narrow down your answers on the options given, and have a greater chance of picking the right one, simply by using the important words you’d identified earlier and establishing connections.

Eliminating Wrong Answers

The good thing with multiple-choice questions is that you know the answer is right there. By eliminating the answers that you are absolutely sure are not correct, you can increase your chances of getting the right one, even if at the end of it, you are just making a Random Mark on one of the choices. Evaluate the information you’ve been given and assess how each option fits with the information, and eliminate the ones that don’t fit. If you manage to narrow down your choices from four options to just two, you increased the Likelihood of getting the right answer by twice what you had initially!

Saving Time

One of the most important things to remember about standardized tests is that time is of great value. Just because you’ve been given 4 hours doesn’t mean it should take you 4 hours. If you can’t figure out the answer to a question, don’t spend too long on it. Make a mark and move on to the next one. Do all the questions you find easy first, and then come back to the ones you had trouble with. By giving yourself some time away from the question, you’d find that you’d be able to process the information better than if you were trying to figure it out for a long time, and might even pick up some important details you had missed earlier.

Of course, besides just working on the test itself, there are some things you should be doing before these tests as well, such as getting a good night’s sleep and eating a good meal before your test. Exercise while you study to help maintain a Healthy Mind and body and develop study methods that work for you, instead of using those that work for other people. By forcing yourself to study in a way that doesn’t help, you’d be lowering your chances of getting a Good Score, even if you follow all the test-taking strategies you learnedabove.