Test-Taking and Study Strategies

With so many tests in a compacted time period, it can be stressful to manage your course load, along with your extracurriculars. It is important to develop test-taking and study strategies to help you ace your tests.

Plan out your schedule. If you are organized, it makes it much easier to stay on top of your class requirements and outside activities, as well as make time to study for exams. All testing schedules can be found on the KHS Website and the College Board website.

The College Board offers the SAT on the following days:

SAT Dates and Deadlines

The AP Test Schedule can be found at 2022 AP Exam Dates.

Mark your calendars! Keeping a planner may be extremely helpful in time management.

While there are no traditional finals this year, there will be a fourth summative assignment that can only help your grade. According to Humble ISD, “Exam exemptions will not be a factor this semester because there will not be semester exams. If a student does not take the last summative and receives a 0, the 0 can be dropped as the lowest summative grade”. However, in “the 2022-2023 school year, Humble ISD will reinstate administering final exams at the conclusion of the fall and spring semesters”. Humble ISD hopes that we will be able to get back on track to regular finals by next year.

As for practice, SAT Practice is available through Khan Academy and Humble ISD gives access to test prep through SHMOOP. There are also various tutoring opportunities around Kingwood. NHS Tutoring is held every Tuesday from 6-8 pm in the KHS library. The College Board offers practice AP tests and helpful videos through AP Classroom.

While it may seem daunting, don’t procrastinate your studying. If you are able to, plan out your studying for small sessions each day. However, if you come to a point where you are cramming, there are countless channels on Youtube, including Heimler’s History, Anti-Social Studies, Tom Richey, and various others that will help you review the material quickly. It may help to take notes or fill out graphic organizers or worksheets while watching these videos in order to prepare.

So, you’ve done hours of preparing for the test, you get to the test, and you panic. What do you do? Some test-taking strategies include annotating passages, reading the test questions and answer choices as carefully as possible, pacing yourself, taking moments to collect yourself, and double-checking your answers. When taking multiple choice exams, there is usually a distractor answer choice, a partially correct answer choice, a totally incorrect answer choice, and the correct answer choice. This is important to note when picking between answer choices. Test-taking strategies can be imperative in one’s success on exam day.

It is critical to develop study and test-taking habits in order to get As, 36’s, 1600’s and 5’s on your exams. Good luck!

Sources:
https://schools.shmoop.com/public-api/google-sso-enterprise/1/start/338A223E521E4DA2BC3F89F23E407706/s
https://www.khanacademy.org/test-prep/sat
https://www.humbleisd.net/site/default.aspx?PageType=3&ModuleInstanceID=224999&ViewID=7b97f7ed-8e5e-4120-848f-a8b4987d588f&RenderLoc=0&FlexDataID=410936&PageID=127179
https://apcentral.collegeboard.org/exam-administration-ordering-scores/exam-dates
https://www.youtube.com/c/SteveHeimler
https://www.youtube.com/c/AntiSocialStudies
https://www.youtube.com/tomrichey
https://www.wunc.org/education/2017-05-15/standardized-test-to-offer-charter-insight