Saturday, May 26, 2012

Don’t be a Perfectionist


If you’re a perfectionist, this may be one of the hardest strategies, and yet one of the most important. The test you are taking is timed, and you cannot afford to spend too much time on any one question.
If you are working on a problem and you’ve got your answer split between two possible answer choices, and you’re going back through the passage and reading it over and over again in order to decide between the two, you can be in one of the most frustrating situations possible. You feel that if you just spent one more minute on the problem, that you would be able to figure the right answer out and decide between the two. Watch out! You can easily get so absorbed in that problem that you loose track of time, get off track and end up spending the rest of the test playing catch up because of all the wasted time, which may leave you rattled and cause you to miss even more questions that you would have otherwise.
Therefore, unless you will only be satisfied with a perfect score and your abilities are in the top .1% strata of test takers, you should not go into the test with the mindset that you’ve got to get every question right. It is far better to accept that you will have to guess on some questions and possibly get them wrong and still have time for every question, than to work on every problem until you’re absolutely confident in your answer and then run out of time on the last few problems.

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