Practice tests: why they work and how to make your own before an exam

Most exam preparation looks like rereading: going over notes, highlighting the textbook, watching the lecture again. It feels productive because the material looks familiar. A practice test is less comfortable. It shows you exactly what you can’t yet do.

That discomfort is the point. Getting an answer out of memory is much more effective preparation than looking at it again.

What the research shows

Our guide to active recall and spaced repetition covers the broad evidence. One experiment is worth looking at more closely, because it explains why so many students avoid testing themselves.

In a 2006 study, students learned a short science passage in one of three ways (Roediger & Karpicke, 2006). One group read it in four study periods. Another read it once and then spent the other three periods writing down everything they could remember. Five minutes later, the readers did better on a final test, recalling 83% of the passage against 71% for the testers.

A week later, the result flipped. The testers recalled 61% of the passage and the readers just 40%, even though the readers had gone through the text about 14 times and the testers about three. The readers were also the most confident that they would remember the passage a week later.

That’s the trap: rereading produces a short-term boost and a feeling of mastery that doesn’t last.

The effect holds up well beyond the lab. A 2017 review of 118 studies found that practice tests produced better learning than rereading and other comparison activities, in classrooms as well as in laboratory studies (Adesope, Trevisan & Sundararajan, 2017).

Where to find good questions

The best practice questions resemble the real exam in format and difficulty. In rough order of usefulness:

1. Past papers. Check your course page, your department’s website and your library, which sometimes keeps an archive. Ask your instructor whether the format has changed since.
2. Sample questions from your instructor. Many will share a few if you ask, or will point you to the problem sets that best match the exam.
3. End-of-chapter questions in your textbook, and the publisher’s companion website if it has one.
4. Questions you write yourself. Turn each heading in your notes into a question. Ask “why” and “how”, not just “what”. In problem-based subjects such as math or physics, change the numbers in a worked example and solve it again without looking.
5. A study group. Each person writes ten questions on a different topic, then you swap.

Using AI to draft questions

AI tools can produce a set of questions from your notes or slides in seconds. That’s useful when you have a lot of material and little time, but the quality varies. Generated questions can be too easy, fixate on minor details or come with an answer key that is simply wrong.

Two habits make them much more useful:

• Generate from your own course materials, not general knowledge. Questions drawn from your lecture slides and readings will match what your course actually covers.
• Check the answer key against your notes or textbook, especially for questions you got wrong.

Skolight is built around this. Its AI exam generator builds a timed mock exam from the PDFs, slides and notes you upload, in the exam style you describe, with up to 50 questions of each type. When you submit, it explains every answer, shows your weak topics and turns them into a revision plan in one step. For shorter practice between lectures, its quiz generator makes quizzes of up to 30 questions.

Take one under exam conditions

At least once before the exam, do a full practice test the way you’ll sit the real one:

• Time yourself and stop when the time is up.
• Close your notes, and put your phone in another room.
• Use the same format. If the exam is handwritten, write by hand. If you’re allowed a calculator, use the same one.

A realistic rehearsal tells you whether you can finish in time, and it makes the real exam feel more familiar. That can also help if exams make you anxious. Our guide to managing test anxiety has more on this.

Mark it properly

A practice test is only half done when you put the pen down. When you mark it:

• Check every answer, including the ones you got right by guessing.
• Write the correct answer in full next to each mistake, without copying it straight from your notes.
• Note why you missed it. Didn’t know it, misread the question, ran out of time or made a careless slip? Each problem has a different fix.

Keep these notes in one place, as an error log. After two or three practice tests, patterns appear: a topic you keep missing, or a question type that always costs you time. That tells you where to spend your remaining study hours.

Time it right

Don’t save your first practice test for the night before. Take it a week or more ahead, so the gaps it reveals leave you time to fix them. Then retest your weak topics a few days later, rather than straight away. Our one-week exam study plan shows how a full rehearsal fits into the final week.

Common mistakes

• Checking the answer too soon. Give each question a real attempt before you look. Struggling to recall something is part of what makes testing work.
• Redoing the same questions until you know the answers. Then you’re memorizing a question set, not the subject. Mix in questions you haven’t seen.
• Treating the score as a prediction. A practice test shows you what to work on. The real exam may weigh topics differently.