What If You Could Create A Copy of Your Exam Ahead of Time?
No, I’m not talking about a covert op where you sneak into your prof’s office and hack their computer.
But you can do something that may come close…
Pretend that you are creating the exam for your class and make up possible questions.
There are some HUGE benefits to creating one or many practice exams on your own.
1) Effective studying: First and foremost, you’ll be getting into the headspace of deeply understanding the material. It’s an effective way to study and you’ll end up learning it pretty thoroughly.
An Australian education company surveyed more than 10,000 students and found an almost straight-line relationship between practice questions completed and final grades.
This is a slightly different take, but it still hits the key point.
2) You’ll get some of the questions: Let me tell you, opening the exam on game day and realizing you correctly forecasted some questions is a huge psychological lift.
Why Doesn't Everyone Do This
So few people know this trick. That’s likely the biggest reason everyone doesn’t do this.
It’s not a ton of work, but you have to complete your studying a little ahead of time. Otherwise, it becomes much trickier, and the questions you make up aren’t as effective.
It’s also possible that if you haven’t done it before you may not know how to come up with questions. That’s today’s focus. My new favorite method is at the end, so make sure you get all the way through.
So now let’s get into the “how” of it.
Sources of Questions
Make Up Possible Exam Questions
This is the first and most obvious route. Make up possible questions that could be on the exam based on your studying.
To increase the effectiveness of this approach, here are a couple of tweaks.
1) Talk to your prof and find out the format of the exam so you are making up a practice exam that is composed correctly. Many exams will have a multiple-choice section, a short answer section and a long answer section.
2) Make up lots of questions. Let’s say you find out that there will be 15 multiple-choice questions; make up as many as you can think of and don’t stop at 15. It will be more effective studying and you’ll be more likely to guess the actual questions.
3) If they’re multiple choice, make them difficult. Think of all the ways you can make a subtle change to the incorrect choices in a way that might trick someone into selecting it. This will help you spot those same tricks on the exam.
4) Be sure to actually answer the questions as well. Create an answer key…it’s an important part of this process & will be handy in the next section.
One really important note is that these are not the same as questions you put into Notion as part of your Active Recall studying. You may select some questions from there but the Notion AR questions are for when you are learning the material.
Get A Couple of Friends To Make Up Questions & Then Swap
This is where the power of this approach is really amplified.
It’s one thing for you to create questions for yourself. But you made them up, which makes it a little easier to try to answer them.
Once you’ve got 2 or so friends working with you on it, then you are getting practice questions
1) you’ve never seen before
2) written from a different person’s perspective
As long as they (and you) are drawing from the right material, the test they give you to complete should be really effective in solidifying the information in your brain.
Find Previous Year's Exams
Many universities will have exam banks where you can buy exams from the previous year.
Not surprisingly, these are great ways to get your hands on the types of questions you might be asked on the exam.
Be wary though. If the instructor is different, they may give totally different exams.
The Internet
This might be an alternative if the last two don’t work.
You can hit some gold mines from other universities posting their problem sets and answer keys (so you can check you’re right after solving the questions yourself) but make sure that they are covering the same material.
The other alternative is a pay site like Chegg.
They have a variety of services including problem sets and questions solved by their experts.
I don’t have a lot of experience with them but it seemed ok at first blush and the people I’ve spoken to about them were generally positive.
Overt Hints From Your Instructor In Class
Once you start listening for it, you’ll notice that instructors will emphasize material they think is important, sometimes in not at all subtle ways.
You might even hear them directly say “this would make a great test question”.
Don’t let those opportunities pass you by.
Make a note in your notes or the text, maybe a capital “T” with a circle around it to flag for you that it might be a good candidate for a test question.
Then, as you’re turning your notes into questions in Notion that evening, create a separate page for possible exam questions that came up during class, either from the instructor flagging them or from you noticing them.
Covert Hints From Your Instructor In Class
This is especially important in quantitative classes.
There’s a good chance you’ll go through examples in class for most of the material you’ll be tested on.
If you miss a class make sure you have friends you can rely on and get their notes to see these examples.
Then, in preparation for the test, modify those examples and use them as practice questions. There are likely many ways to modify the questions to incorporate tricks so you are less surprised on the test.
Let’s take the simple example of a calculus question in microeconomics. In class, the prof runs through the example where the equation you have to take the first derivative of is 5x^2 + 2x. The answer is 10x + 2, but come up with multiple variations on this to make sure you understand how it works.
Modify the exponent on both x variables, add a constant at the end, make one of the exponents a fraction or make one of them cubed instead of squared.
Most questions will give you lots of ways to make it trickier.
This approach, especially combined with trading questions with classmates who are trying to make the exams tougher, will help you crush the exams.
As a quick caveat, the instructor may not say – “hmmm, this might be on the exam,” but there’s a good chance it will be if they’re spending lots of time on it.
Your intuition on this stuff will improve over time.
Use ChatGPT To Generate Questions
This is my new favorite method. It’s so versatile and can be unbelievably effective.
The simplest approach to this is to ask it to generate questions on a certain topic.
Be aware that the better the prompt you provide, the better the answer you’ll get. You’ll likely have to play with this a bit to get good questions, but once you hone in on it, this will prove to be an insanely valuable resource because you can get autogenerated questions and answers.
It’ll be especially helpful where there’s some quantitative element because you can put in real repetitions with fresh questions, and then it can explain the answers if you don’t really get it.
One tweak worth trying is creating a chatbot for the subject and feeding it the material you’re responsible for. Then, get it to ask you questions. This may sound intimidating, but it is super easy. I might even do a newsletter explaining how you can do this.
One other tweak is that you can toggle the difficulty and ask it for harder questions.
As I’m writing this, it occurs to me that you could even put in sample questions from class and ask it to generate questions like that. You could actually generate a full exam from this.
The possibilities are limitless with this one so make sure you explore it.
Please message me back and let me know what’s working for you.
So You Have All These Questions...What Now?
By far, one of the most effective ways to study is by testing yourself.
You have now built a solid resource of test questions. Create sample exams for yourself and take them under as close to exam conditions as possible.
There are 2 reasons to approach it this way.
1) Get as realistic as possible a feel for what you’re going to be experiencing.
2) Diagnose what types of questions and topics you’re struggling with.
You may notice that you keep getting tripped up by certain types of multiple-choice questions, or there may be a topic that you just don’t know well enough.
To be fair, both are probably rooted in not knowing the material well enough, so I’d start with that as the solution.
That’s where you go into your toolbox and figure out the most effective tool to get a better grasp. Should you use the Feynman Technique and explain the topic to people to identify the specifics of the gaps or is it simply getting your Anki flashcard deck out and creating a separate subdeck in a certain topic to help you learn it better?
You may even need to see the professor during office hours or make an appointment if you’re still struggling with it.
Regardless, you know where to focus your attention.
Try this a few times, and let me know how many questions you anticipate successfully.
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