“It was exhausting.”
There is a physical toll you pay for concentrating and reading for such a long period of time.
You need to train for the physical part of your exam as well as the content knowledge. This is obvious when you’re training your muscles, but we think of our brains as computers. We think that they work at the same level all the time and they don’t need training or rest.
That isn’t even a little true. Our brains are affected by tons of things. They’re organic just like the rest of you. Not enough sleep equals harder to focus, not enough water equals harder to focus, low blood sugar equals harder to focus.
You can train your brain to be able to focus for longer and longer periods of time. It isn’t an inborn skill. You develop it over time. Like being able to walk or run further and further.
As you train, you go from running 4 or 5 miles on a “long” run to running 18 to 20 miles on a “long” run before your race. You don’t do a bunch of 4 mile runs and then go out and run 26 miles. You might be able to drag yourself across the finish line, but it will suck and you’ll wonder why you ever signed up for the stupid race.
As you get closer to your exam, think about the physical end of training. Set a plan to increase the amount of time you spend concentrating. Do larger and larger questions banks as you get closer and closer. Train your system to work well up until hour 3. If you walk into your exam having never sat for 3 or 4 hours, you will feel awful on test day. And you will do worse and worse on the exam as the minutes tick by.
Get some training in. Increase your study periods gradually. Increase the size of the practice tests you do until you get up to 2, 3 or even 4 hours. I know this is a lot of time to take out of your day, but your brain can use the exercise.
The other thing my friend mentioned was how hard it was to jump around from one topic to another on the exam. It’s difficult to leave behind one topic to move to the next, and have to quickly figure out which topic the question is asking about.
I like using questions by topic as you are learning something new. Or covering the material for the first time, but you also need to quickly move to having the topics mixed together. It is definitely much harder.
That’s why The Final Step has questions arranged in both ways. Part A has all the questions by topic. Part B has all 1200 questions mixed together in completely random order.
Brian Wallace
P.S. If you’re willing to run a group order for your classmates, I can offer a significant discount on The Final Step. Shipping is a huge part of the cost and group orders are much cheaper to ship. You don’t need to set up the whole group – you just need to be willing to let people know about the discount.
If you’re interested, hit reply and I’ll send you the details.
