General Test-Taking Strategies
Most of these “strategies” are common sense; many of them
you already know. But we’re including them anyway because it’s amazing
how a timed test can warp and mangle common sense. If you review
anything in the minutes before taking the test, review these strategies.
General Hint 1: Be Calm
The best way to do poorly on a test is to psych yourself
out. Physics in particular calls for cool, systematic thinking:
if your mind starts thrashing about wildly, it will have a hard time
settling on the right answers. There are a number of preventative
measures you can take, beginning weeks, or even months, before the
test date. Buying this book was a good start: it’s reassuring to
see all the information you’ll need to ace the test in a compact,
manageable form. But there are a number of other things you ought
to keep in mind:
Study in advance.
If you’ve studied at regular intervals leading up to the
test, and don’t do all your cramming the night before, the information
will sit more securely in your mind.
Be well rested.
Get a good night’s sleep on the two nights leading up
to the test. If you’re frazzled or wired, you’re going to have a
harder time buckling down and concentrating when it really counts.
Come up for air.
Don’t assume that the best way to take an hour-long test
is to spend the full hour nose-to-nose with the test questions.
If you lift your head occasionally, look about you, and take a deep
breath, you’ll return to the test with a clearer mind. You’ll lose
maybe ten seconds of your total test-taking time, but you’ll be
all the more focused for the other fifty-nine minutes and fifty
General Hint 2: Fill in Your Answers Carefully
This is very important. People make mistakes filling in
their answer sheets and it can cost them big-time. This slip up
occurs most frequently after you skip a question. If you left question
43 blank, and then unthinkingly put the answer to question 44 into
row 43, you could start a long, painful chain of wrong answers.
Don’t do this.
Some test prep books advise that you fill in your answer
sheet five questions at a time rather than one at a time. Some suggest
that you fill out each oval as you answer the question. We think
you should fill out the answer sheet in whatever way feels most
natural to you, but make sure you’re careful while doing it. In
our opinion, the best way to ensure that you’re being careful is
to talk to yourself: as you figure out an answer in the test booklet
and transfer it over to the answer sheet ovals, say to yourself:
“Number 23, B. Number 24, E. Number 25, A.”
General Hint 3: Pace Yourself
At the very least, aim to look at every question
on the test. You can’t afford to lose points because you didn’t
have the time to look at a question you could have easily answered.
You can spend an average of forty-eight seconds on each question,
though you’ll probably breeze through some in ten seconds and dwell
on others for two minutes. Knowing how to pace yourself is a critical
skill—and these three guidelines should help:
Don’t dwell on any one question for too long.
If you’ve spent a couple minutes laboring over the question,
you might just want to make a note of it and move on. If you feel
the answer is on the tip of your tongue, it might come more easily
if you just let it rest and come back to it later. Not only is it
demoralizing to spend five minutes on a single question, but it
also eats up precious time in which you might have answered a number
of easier questions.
Nail the easy questions.
As we said in the previous chapter, the test questions
get progressively harder as you go along. Nonetheless, there will
be some tough ones thrown in right at the start, and you’ll find
giveaways right up until the end. If you dwell too long on tough
questions, you jeopardize your chances of looking at every question
and gaining points for the easy ones. Remember: you get as many
points for answering an easy question as a difficult one, and you
get a lot more points for five quickly answered easy questions than
for one hard-earned victory.
Skip the unfamiliar.
If you encounter a question you can’t make heads
or tails of, just skip it. Don’t sweat too hard trying to sort out
what’s going on. If you have time at the end, come back to it and
see if you can make an educated guess. Your first priority should
be to get all the easy questions, and your second priority should
be to work through the questions you can solve with some difficulty. Unfamiliar
material should be at the bottom of your list of priorities.
General Hint 4: Set a Target Score
You can make the job of pacing yourself much easier if
you go into the test knowing how many questions you have to answer
correctly in order to earn the score you want. So, what score do
you want? Obviously, you should strive for the best score possible,
but also be realistic: consider how much you know about physics
and how well you do, generally, on SAT-type tests. You should also
do a little research and find out what counts as a good score for
the colleges you’re applying to: is it a 620? a 680? Talk to the
admissions offices of the colleges you might want to attend, do
a little research in college guidebooks, or talk to your guidance
counselor. Find out the average score of students admitted to the
schools of your choice, and set your target score above it (you
want to be above average, right?). Then take a look at the chart
we showed you before. You can score:
800 if you answered 68 right, 7 wrong, and left 0 blank
750 if you answered 58 right, 12 wrong, and left 5 blank
700 if you answered 51 right, 13 wrong, and left 11 blank
650 if you answered 43 right, 16 wrong, and left 16 blank
600 if you answered 36 right, 19 wrong, and left 20 blank
Suppose the average score on SAT II Physics for the school
you’re interested in is 650. Set your target at about 700. To get
that score, you need to get 51 questions right, which leaves you
room to get 13 wrong and leave 11 blank. In other words, you can
leave a number of tough questions blank, get a bunch more wrong,
and still get the score you want. As long as you have some idea
of how many questions you need to answer—bearing in mind that you’ll
likely get some questions wrong—you can pace yourself accordingly.
Taking practice tests is the best way to work on your pacing.
If you find yourself effortlessly hitting your target
score when you take the practice tests, don’t just pat yourself
on the back. Set a higher target score and start aiming for that one.
The purpose of buying this book and studying for the test is to
improve your score as much as possible, so be sure to push your
General Hint 5: Know What You’re Being Asked
You can’t know the answer until you know the question.
This might sound obvious, but many a point has been lost by the
careless student who scans the answer choices hastily before properly
understanding the question. Take the following example:
positively charged particles, one twice as massive as the other,
are moving in the same circular orbit in a magnetic field. Which
law explains to us why the less massive particle moves at twice
the speed of the more massive particle?
||Conservation of angular momentum
||The ideal gas law
||Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle
The hasty student will notice that the question is about
charged particles, and see “Coulomb’s Law” as the first answer choice.
Without further ado, the student answers A and loses
a quarter of a point.
A more careful student will not just read the question,
but will take a moment to understand the question
before glancing at the answer choices. This student will realize
that the question ultimately deals with particles moving in circular
orbits, and the relative speeds of these particles. Whether or not
these particles are charged is irrelevant: you’re facing a problem
of rotational motion, not of electric forces. Once you’ve recognized
what you’re dealing with, you will have little trouble in correctly
General Hint 6: Know How to Guess
ETS doesn’t take off 1
of a point for
each wrong answer in order to punish you for guessing. They do it
so as not to reward you for blind guessing. Suppose that, without
looking at the questions at all, you just randomly entered responses
in the first 20 spaces on your answer sheet. Because there’s a 20%
chance of guessing correctly on any given question, odds are you
would guess right for four questions and wrong for 16 questions.
Your raw score for those 20 questions would then be:
You would be no better off and no worse off than
if you’d left those twenty spaces blank.
Now suppose in each of the first 20 questions you are
able to eliminate just one possible answer choice, so that you guess
with a 25% chance of being right. Odds are, you’d get five questions
right and 15 questions wrong, giving you a raw score of:
The lesson to be learned here is that blind guessing doesn’t
help, but educated guessing does. If you can eliminate even one
of the five possible answer choices, you should guess. We’ll discuss
how to eliminate answer choices on certain special kinds of questions
in Physics Hint 5: Eliminate Wrong Answers.
Guessing as Partial Credit
Some students feel that guessing is like cheating—that
guessing correctly means getting credit where none is due. But instead
of looking at guessing as an attempt to gain undeserved points,
you should look at it as a form of partial credit. Suppose you’re
stumped on the question we looked at earlier regarding the charged
particle moving in circular motion in a magnetic field. Though you
don’t know the correct answer, you may know the answer isn’t the
ideal gas law, because the question doesn’t deal with gases in any
way. Suppose you also know that the answer isn’t Hooke’s Law, because
Hooke’s Law deals with force exerted by a spring, and there are
no springs in this question. Don’t you deserve something for that
extra knowledge? Well, you do get something: when you look at this
question, you can throw out C and D as
answer choices, leaving you with a one in three chance of getting the
question right if you guess. Your extra knowledge gives you better
odds of getting this question right, exactly as extra knowledge