How can you best prepare for a multiple choice math exam?

1. Watch all the lectures and take good notes.

2. Do all the homework problems and get help on the one’s you don’t understand.

3. Before the final exam, study your lecture notes, homework problems and if helpful, make a study sheet of all important formulas and information. Use some of the resources in MyMathLab to practice concepts you are weak in.

4. Take the practice exam I will post on the course Moodle page as a practice exam. By this, I mean you should set aside 2 hours, sit in a quiet place with no notes, book, calculator. Take the practice exam as if you were really taking the real exam. Do all the questions as best you can – and most important of all, don’t get any help or look anything up while you’re taking it. Once you’re done, use the key we post to grade your exam. The material of questions you got correct you should only lightly review. The material of the questions you got wrong, you should study in depth and if necessary, get help with.

5. On test day, remember some time honored multiple-choice test taking strategies like:

• Work carefully and methodically to arrive at an answer before looking at the choices. If you try to quickly guess at an answer you may hastily choose incorrectly when you really know how to do the problem.
• Do all the problems you know well first…even if you skip around a lot. You don’t have to start at #1 and finish at #25. If you get turned in knots over a problem early on, you may use up too much time on one you eventually have to guess on anyways and then be short on time you really know how to do. BE STRATEGIC! Get all your easy one’s done first. Then work on the tougher ones.
• If you really don’t know how to do a problem, if you can eliminate some of the choices, you will increase your chances of guessing correctly.