Test Taking Skills: Practicing Questions vs. Memorizing Outlines

Great site, thanks for the tips. Question for you regarding recommended study method.

Once you've completed your initial review of the core MBE subjects and have gone through at least 50 subject-only questions for each subject, do you recommend that a person continue tackling questions subject only, or do you recommend switching to mixed questions at this point on?

Response:

It's a really good question. The strategy I recommend is to read an outline, do about 50 questions, move on to the next outline and do the same. After getting through all the outlines, start over again. Ideally, you'll do this numerous times; you should find that each time you read a given outline (again) you will be picking up on new things, as your perspective of the material will have changed after working on questions for that topic.

Once you feel very comfortable with each individual subject, you should move on to mixed questions. At that point, you should probably put the outlines aside; around the last two weeks of studying is a good time to move on to mixed questions.

Hope this helps!

Sean