How to make a practice test from your notes

Rereading your notes feels like studying because everything on the page looks familiar. A practice test is the opposite experience: it is slower, it is uncomfortable, and it tells you the truth about what you can actually pull out of your head. That discomfort is the point. Retrieving something from memory strengthens it far more than looking at it again — the testing effect, one of the most consistent findings in learning research.

So the job of a practice test is not to give you a score. It is to find what you cannot retrieve yet, while there is still time to fix it.

The short version

1. Turn each idea into a question with one answer. "What are the four pillars of heart failure therapy?" — not "Heart failure".
2. Hide the answers. Cards, a folded page, a second column you cover with your hand.
3. Shuffle. Notes in lecture order are a cue in themselves.
4. Answer before you look. Out loud or on paper, in full.
5. Mark it right or wrong, nothing in between. "I sort of knew it" is wrong.
6. Write down every miss. That list is what you study next, not the whole chapter again.
7. Retest the misses a day or two later.

Writing questions that actually test something

Most weak practice tests are weak because of the questions, not the effort. A few rules make a big difference:

• One answer per question. "Describe the kidney" cannot be marked right or wrong. "Where in the nephron does furosemide act?" can.
• Ask why, not only what. "What does ACE stand for?" tests a label. "Why do ACE inhibitors cause a dry cough?" tests whether you understand the mechanism, which is what exams reward.
• Put the answer in your own words. Copy a sentence from the slides and blank out one word, and you end up testing whether you recognise the sentence.
• Include the questions you would hate to get. A test made only of what you already know is a comfort blanket.

Twenty good questions beat a hundred vague ones.

How long, and in what order

• 10 questions is a check you can do on the bus.
• 20 tells you whether a topic is ready.
• 40 or more is closer to the real exam, and worth sitting once or twice before it.

Shuffle every time. If you always meet the same questions in the same order, you learn the order. And do not quietly skip the ones you dread — draw at random so you cannot.

Marking it honestly

A practice test only works if the score is honest, and the easiest place to fool yourself is the answer you half remembered. Count it as wrong. You are not grading yourself for a transcript; you are building a list of what to fix.

Speed matters too. If you got it right but needed a minute of staring, note it — under exam pressure that one may not come.

Making one from a PDF or slides

The method is the same, with one warning: slides are written to be spoken over, so a slide title is rarely a question. Take each slide and ask what the lecturer would expect you to know from it. Usually that is one or two questions — a definition, a mechanism, a number, a comparison. The bold terms in a textbook chapter are a good start for definitions, but they are not the whole test.

What to do with the misses

The list of misses is the most valuable thing the test produced. Study those items — explain them out loud, look up what confused you, make them into cards — and test them again a day or two later, then again a few days after that. Spacing the retests out is what makes the fix last.

How Quat does it

Quat is an iPhone and iPad app I make, so this part is an interested party talking.

You capture your material — a photo of a page, a PDF, a link or a lecture recording — and Quat turns it into cards, each one carrying where it came from. When you want a practice test, exam mode draws a shuffled paper from all your cards or from one folder: 10, 20, 40 or every card. You see one card at a time, reveal the answer and mark yourself right or wrong.

Before you start, each folder shows how many cards it has, how many need work (the last answer was Again or Hard) and how many you have never seen, so you can pick the subject that needs it most. At the end you get the score and the list of what you missed, and one button sends those cards back into your review queue. The exam itself never changes when your cards are next due; it is a measurement.

What Quat does not do, so you do not go looking for it: it does not write multiple-choice questions and it does not grade typed answers — you mark yourself. It works from your own material; there are no ready-made question banks. Exams are free without limit; turning captures into cards has a monthly allowance on the free plan.

Sources

• Roediger and Karpicke (2006), Test-enhanced learning, Psychological Science.
• Dunlosky and colleagues (2013), Improving students' learning with effective learning techniques, Psychological Science in the Public Interest — rates practice testing and spaced practice as high utility, and rereading and highlighting as low.