How do you pass the NPTE? The easy answer is studying, of course! However, it’s what and how you study that is the key to your passing the exam. Now, if you consider just reading the study guides as being sufficient, you may still fall short of passing this clinically-integrated comprehensive exam. A better way to study is based on your missed NPTE practice exam questions.
Why Study the NPTE Missed Practice Exam Questions?
Studying your missed NPTE practice exam questions is one way to prepare for the actual exam. It helps you to see what general areas you need to focus on to improve your score. When reviewing your missed questions, your studies can be guided to the most important aspects of what to know rather than reading everything about a topic in detail.
More Than Just Content
When focusing on studying your missed NPTE questions, you can spend more time learning, understanding, and retaining the information. Actively learning why you miss something is helpful to avoid making the same mistake again. But that’s only the content aspect; there’s more to gain by understanding how the NPTE questions are derived, as well as learning how to differentiate from the test-taking point of view. This helps to avoid the academic study habits of memorizing and other mistakes that decrease scores.
Recognizing Patterns
To get more NPTE questions correct, focus on recognizing patterns in the exam questions. Understand the anatomy of the NPTE question by seeing these patterns both in the question scenario as well as the answer. When you understand the patterns of how questions are asked or how answers are presented, you can train yourself to study effectively by anticipating what to expect on the exam.
While organizing your missed NPTE questions, you can also recognize patterns on the topics and get a better feel of what may be on the exam. Focusing on your areas of weakness to strengthen them helps to avoid just concentrating on the most missed questions by systems. This will help narrow what you study and allow you to process the information. Keep in mind, there’s always something to learn so you’ll want to avoid not studying enough.
Reviewing the Missed NPTE Questions
It’s simple enough to review your missed NPTE questions and read the rationales. However, at the end of the day, if you can’t remember what you just learned, then it will be harder to answer the questions correctly. This is where you can take the opportunity to actively engage by learning to utilize the study guides effectively while marking up the NPTE questions.
Take analyzing your missed NPTE questions to the next level by picking out keywords and correlating them in order to help you better retain the information. You will lose many points when you overlook keywords. Recognizing keywords helps you to reduce overanalysis and other common exam mistakes made on the NPTE.
Is It Enough?
Just studying your missed NPTE practice exam questions may make you feel like you are not covering enough for the exam; however, it’s more helpful than you think. With the NPTE questions becoming more clinically-based and integrated, you’ll want to recognize that there may be different parts of the scenario that need to be put together in order to answer the question.
As you are studying the answers whether they are correct or incorrect, that’s potentially four areas that you are also learning about. This is especially true when focusing on the conditions and diagnoses, you learn not just one area but all four. Now, some of the answers may be related, but they can be a review and that can help you answer a similar question on the NPTE. So, essentially you are studying more than just the question you missed.
Learning From the Test-Taking Perspective
By also studying the answers from your missed NPTE practice exam questions, you can solidify your knowledge by being able to recognize the reasoning. Being able to simply state why an answer is eliminated or chosen helps to better reinforce the content information. This extra step can reduce the back and forth between two multiple choice answers on the exam. It’s a strategy and technique provided in this online NPTE course.
Efficient Studying Time
One of the benefits of studying your missed NPTE practice exam questions is that it doesn’t take very long to review. Compare this to reading about a particular topic and you can spend hours referring to too many resources. In less than a half hour, you could learn more about a topic and remember the information better than just reading.
Reviewing your missed questions systematically rather than going through one after another, allows your brain to organize the information better. This also lets you be consistent in studying, even on busy days. Reviewing a few missed NPTE questions can still make you feel the accomplishment of getting some studying done.
Reinforcing the Learned Information
Another great aspect of using your missed NPTE questions is that at the end of the day of learning, you can create a brain dump sheet or cheat sheet for yourself. It’s a way for you to review important concepts that you can refer to on your busy days. That way you are able to still get some studying in and also review prior learnings without having to go back to re-review. Lastly, studying your missed questions more like a patient diagnosis and analysis allows you to maintain your motivation to study for the NPTE.
As you can see, studying your missed questions is quite effective in preparing for your PT board exam. You’ll gain a lot with this study method and find that this is less overwhelming than reading extensively for the entire exam.