You’ve made it to test day! Congratulations! To maximise your performance, A-List has put together our Top Test Day Tips to get you through in flying colours:

Focus on Core Strategies:

Reading: always go back and check the text and ensure you choose an answer choice based upon textual evidence and reasoning. Ensure the whole answer choice matches the question and actively seek parts of answer choices that do not fit to eliminate them.

English: always read the full sentence, find the subject-verb pair, and circle any punctuation in the sentence. This will help you deduce the sentences’ structures correctly.

Maths: use the A-List maths techniques (we have several blogs on these and our Book of Knowledge also covers them thoroughly!), write out all your working, double-check the question AND your working.

Science: go straight to the questions and then double check the labels of all graphs, tables, and axis. This latter point is also hugely applicable to the maths section.

Skip black hole questions – questions that will take a long time to answer because they are very complicated. Guess something and move on.

Treat Your Body Well:

You ask a lot of your body on test day – prepare it well! Ensure you get lots of sleep for the two nights before the test (not just the night before!), eat a protein-heavy breakfast and drink water throughout the test to stay hydrated. In the breaks, as well as helping yourself to a slow-release energy snack (like a banana, nuts, dried fruit and natural energy bars high in protein), walk around the room or corridor and stretch to get the blood flowing well again. This is crucial to aid your stamina in the latter part of the test.

Be Kind to Yourself:

Standardised tests are not designed to be enjoyable so do not worry if the test feels uncomfortable. You are aiming for improvement and to increase your understanding of the test, rather than perfection. You can place into a competitive university with below 1600! Focusing on what you can improve rather than putting pressure on yourself to get every question right frees up your mind to work more flexibly and quickly to solve the problems in front of you.