How to Improve Your Multiple Choice Scores on the MBE

Many students are frightened of the MBE because they have never done well on multiple choice tests.  If you fall into this category, the important thing is that you do as many practice questions as you can during bar prep.  As you do them, try to figure out exactly what the problem is.

Students who do not like multiple choice exams usually go back and change answers.  Whenever I have my students take a look at their work later, it usually turns out that changing answers only hurt them.  If you have the tendency to go back, study your exam and see if this helped you even once.  Usually, people are only hurt by going back, or at least hurt more than they are helped.  Do the next few sets of practice questions promising yourself that you won't go back.  You'll probably discover you did better.

Some students do poorly on multiple choice exams because they read too fast and miss important words.  If you go over your answers and discover that you are doing this, slow down your reading.

But, some students have a problem with running out of time.  For that, the only thing you can do is do as many practice questions as possible until you have the cadence of the questions down and you naturally want to move when 1.8 minutes are up (the time you have for each MBE question).  It's fine (actually, I think a fantastic idea) to do the same questions more than once, so the materials you have now will be plenty.

Don't skip questions to come back to the harder ones later -- you will run out of time, and likely screw up the Scantron sheet, which is a disaster.  Just answer the questions as they come, and give each 1.8 minutes.

In working to improve student scores, the thing that seems to help the most is doing the questions, then going over them and creating a list of "Things I Did Not Know" -- either the reason you missed the question, or the wrong reason that still lead you to the right answer.  Keep the things you did not know short.  For example, "Did not know the amount in controversy has to be over $75,000."  Study that list.  Multiple choice questions are designed for you to be able to spit out one particular factoid.  If you have a list of all the ones you didn't know memorized, you'll never miss questions based on those factoids again, and the same ideas tend to repeat themselves. (Alex Ruskell)