Make a Practice Test That Feels Like the Real Exam

Old exams are the best practice material, but there are never enough of them, and they rarely match this year's syllabus. The fix is to make a practice test yourself. It takes about an hour, it teaches you while you build it, and it gives you something no amount of rereading can: an honest score before the score that counts.

This guide walks through a build you can repeat for any course. It sits inside our wider practice testing guide, which covers why testing works. Here we focus on the craft: what to put on the paper and how to use it.

In a classic 2006 experiment by Roediger and Karpicke, students who recalled a passage instead of rereading it remembered 56% a week later against 42% for the rereaders. A test you write yourself puts that effect to work, and the act of writing questions forces you to decide what matters in each topic.

1. Map the exam

Start with the syllabus, the learning objectives, and anything your instructor said about the exam. Write each topic on a line and estimate its share of the marks. A topic that got three weeks of lectures probably deserves more questions than one that got a single slide.

2. Match the real format

If the exam is mostly multiple choice, your test should be too. If it has essays or worked problems, include them. Format matters because different questions call for different kinds of recall. A study of test formats by Kang, McDermott and Roediger found that short answer quizzes with feedback led to the best final performance, better than multiple choice quizzes or rereading the facts. So even for a multiple choice exam, add a few short answer items.

3. Write questions that make you think

• Ask for application, not just definitions: "Which of these is an example of..." or "What happens if...".
• Write wrong options for multiple choice from real confusions, such as two similar terms from the same lecture.
• For each topic, add one question that links it to another topic. Exams love those.
• Avoid copying sentences from the textbook. If the wording is familiar, you may recognize it without knowing it.

4. Write the answer key before you sit it

Writing the key first stops you from being generous later. For long answers, list the three or four points a marker would look for. This is also where you will catch questions that are vague or have two right answers, so fix those now.

A full length mock is useful once or twice near the end, mainly for pacing and stamina. Earlier on, shorter tests are better because you can take more of them. Three 25 minute tests across two weeks will usually teach you more than one three hour test the night before.

A large study on spacing effects by Cepeda and colleagues tested more than 1,350 people. For a test one week away, the best gap between study sessions was about 20 to 40% of that week. For a test a year away, it fell to about 5 to 10%. In plain terms: for an exam in a week, review again in roughly two days, not two hours.

Feedback is where most of the learning happens. In a study of word learning by Pashler and colleagues, giving the correct answer after an error raised one week retention by 494% compared with no feedback. Feedback after correct answers made little difference. So spend your marking time on the misses.

1. Mark strictly against your key. Half right is wrong for review purposes.
2. For each miss, write the right answer in your own words and one line on why you missed it: did not know, mixed up, misread, ran out of time.
3. Move those items into a mistake log and retake them a few days later.
4. Track your score per topic, not just overall. That tells you where your next study hour goes.

Writing questions is the slowest part, and it is fine to get help with it. LearnKit can turn a PDF, a lecture or a page of notes into multiple choice and open questions, which you can then edit, mix and time yourself on.

• Writing only easy questions. If you score 95% the first time, the test is too gentle to teach you much.
• Keeping topics in lecture order. Real exams jump around. Shuffle so each question has to stand on its own.
• Taking it open book. Checking the notes mid test turns it into rereading.
• Never retaking it. A single test shows the gaps. The retake closes them. See how to review a graded exam for the same approach after real tests.