If you’re preparing for an upcoming exam, practice exams are a powerful tool—if you use them correctly. Many students, however, make the mistake of simply looking up answers or relying on shortcuts, which leads to poor performance on the actual exam. In this blog post, we’ll break down how to best use practice exams, why they should be a part of a larger study strategy, and how this fits into the deliberate practice method for mastering your material.

College is the perfect place to begin to understand who you are as a student--how you learn, your style of working, communication, peer connections and more. Once you step foot on campus, you may find that the student you were in high school and the styles it took for you to earn the good (or poor) grades might not be well-suited for what you face in college.

Now that New Year's celebrations have ended and the new semester is in full swing, it's time to maximize your study habits to ace your exams. But how? Perhaps by now, you've heard different ways to study effectively, such as studying right before sleeping, spraying peppermint oil on your clothes, using multi-colored pens— the list goes on. What if the solution to your study needs is much simpler than cramming in as much information as possible before bedtime?