Improving Test Grades Through Error Analysis
It’s hard to believe that we’re over a month into the new school year, isn’t it? By now, you’ve taken quizzes and tests in most if not all of your classes. Are your grades what you hoped they’d be?
If not, the good news is that it’s plenty early to make adjustments that will help. Your first instinct is probably that you need to study more. But as we’ve maintained all along at EEG, the real answer is not necessarily to work harder, but to work smarter. An important way to do that is through error analysis. Which questions did you get wrong? Is there a pattern to your mistakes? How, specifically, can you change up your study habits to address this information?
Analyzing Patterns: Test Formats
When looking over your tests and quizzes, think about the format and how that impacted your answers. Did you have difficulty with multiple choice, open-ended questions, or essays? There are strategies to address each.
With multiple choice answers, try to analyze where you tend to go wrong. For example, do you typically guess wrong when there are two answers that are similar? That might suggest paying more attention to detail when studying. Or, when a choice is “all of the above” or “none of the above” do you disregard it completely? That might suggest you need to pay closer attention to the test question itself.
For open-ended questions, it can also be helpful to think about which ones in particular were difficult and why. Was it a question about something that was only touched on briefly and you never expected it to be on the test? Or was it something that you thought you understood, but really didn’t? Remembering these when studying for the next unit might remind you not to overlook facts that, upon first glance, don’t seem important. Similarly, be sure to review concepts that you’re pretty sure you already understand instead of skipping over them when studying.
For essay questions, did your answer respond to all parts of the prompt? Did it have enough detail? If you missed responding to part of the essay prompt and lost points, that is a sign that you need to slow down and reread the prompt before deciding you have finished the answer. If you didn’t have enough detail, think about whether you wrote down everything you knew or whether you were rushing to get it done. That will tell you whether you need to do a deeper dive when memorizing facts, or whether you need to slow down and review your answers before considering them complete.
Study Strategies
Now that you’ve analyzed your mistakes, you can work on adjusting your study strategies appropriately. Is your note-taking accurate? If you are given a study guide, are you paying equal attention to everything on it, or glossing over some of it? Based on your previous tests, what should you expect regarding the format of upcoming tests and quizzes? Putting some thought into these questions as you study leads to smarter preparation…which leads to better grades. And if you’re having difficulty with the process of error analysis, don’t be afraid to ask for help. This can be from your teacher, your parents, or your tutor or executive function coach.