Club of people who failed April 2015

[ENVE]

Failed here too, first time....37/80. I had less than 2 months from exam approval to study, and put waaaay too much faith in School of PE. If School of PE was worth it's salt (and the $1,000 spent), I think I'd have scored better. I did every practice problem and troubleshooted wrong answers, attended every class, and failed. I think if I try this again next April (getting married in Sept), I'm going to begin doing timed NCEES practice problems right after Christmas. The issue I'm having is I am discouraged by such a poor grade first time around, will I even have a remote shot at getting it next time? I've failed a few standardized tests recently, and just may hang my hat and accept where I am in my career and stop wasting my time.

For me, I found knowing HOW they asked the problem and WHAT they wanted to be more important than timing myself or even doing practice problems. There were some problems that I labeled 'hard' on the test. When I got around to them, I just had to scratch my head and say, "really? that's all you wanted?". When I studied, I didn't time myself or even take practice tests under 'similar conditions'. What was more important to me was figuring out what they wanted.

The best advice I was given was: read the problem and UNDERLINE what they are asking of you. Then, CIRCLE the units they want the answer in.

I caught myself, MULTIPLE TIMES, with wrong units or using the wrong equations until I reread the problem to fully understand what they were asking. This happened both during my practice problems AND during the actual exam. Fully understanding the problem helped me tremendously and caught all those silly errors. It's the reason I passed rather than failed.