Reviewing a practice exam is even more important than taking it! You will learn so much about common mistakes you make and identify specific content areas to review. Your lessons learned journal will help you to more thoroughly review your exams and identify trends in your mistakes.

How to fill in your Lessons Learned Journal

1. Take your test (or Qbank quiz) and then give yourself some time to process. Especially if you've just taken a full length, you'll need some time to decompress between when you take the test and when you review it. But don't wait too long. Ideally, you'll review a full length the next day, shorter practice can be reviewed the same day. If you must extend your review over several days, we suggest starting with CARS review to limit the amount of re-reading you have to do.

2. Use the built-in LLJ button for your review of each question you got wrong and any questions you got right but were unsure of. You can see in the screenshot below that this student changed their answer from wrong to right.

3. Grab your microscope and do a thorough analysis of the question, taking notes when appropriate. Approach the questions you missed like a researcher: gather all the data you think may be relevant to identifying trends and analyze how that data changes over time. Identify both strategy issues and content issues. Be as specific as possible. The more focused you are in identifying problems, the more focused you can be in actively finding solutions!

4. Build your Lessons Learned Journal entry into the pop-up provided to build out your journal. See the instructions here for more details.

5. Use your LLJ to reflect on your reviewed exam and identify the top few strategies that you need to implement to get more questions correct. Do you want to highlight more in question stems? Do you need to reference the passage more in CARS? Make it a priority to emphasize these as you work practice problems. Also choose a few high yield (for you!) content areas to review.

6. Look back over the journal regularly to review your overall learnings. Consider sorting and filtering by different columns to see how often similar issues are recurring. Make sure to practice with those issues that you've noted, focusing most heavily on any issues that keep coming up over time.