PARENTING ARTICLES & TIPS

Practice Exams - Help Your Teenage Child Get Better Grades At School!

Practice exams can be a great tool for helping your child improve their study performance and get better schoold grades ... 

My daughter is going to be in eleventh grade in high school. She is planning on going to college when she graduates from high school, so she needs to take entrance tests to qualify. The entrance tests have become more important due to the number of students that are making application to universities across the country. My daughter is a good student; however there are times when it is difficult for her to take tests. We knew that it would be important for her to complete practice exams so that she would go into the actual test with confidence.

At first I did not know how to locate a trial test for her. I asked her to check with her guidance counselor at school to see if practice exams were given at her high school or somewhere else within our community. My daughter talked with her guidance counselor and came home with several options for practice exams. Her particular high school offered the exams in conjunction with another high school in the neighboring community. The two schools combined to offer the practice exams because the test was given on a Saturday. By giving the practice exams on Saturdays the students did not have to miss regularly scheduled classes and did not have to take the lengthy timed test on an evening after they had been sitting in the classroom all day. Also the actual entrance exam is given on a Saturday. My daughter was given a study guide for the particular test that she would be taking, as well as a website that she could access to gather additional information about entrance tests in general.

We researched the website together and were surprised by the number of practice exams that are offered. You can find trial exams for basically any test that is given. We saw sites that offered practice exams for getting into medical school, for getting your medical license and for nursing licenses. There were also tests for getting into law school as well as passing your bar exam. There was also a site for the practice exams for certified public accountants. This interested my daughter because accounting is the field of study that she is considering going into.

By going through the study guide that had been provided my daughter felt confident that she was going to do well on the trial test the Saturday morning that she went to take it. We have found with my daughter that her confidence level is significant to her doing well.

She had a very high score on the practice test. I was very pleased that they scored the tests immediately so that she did not have the anxiety of waiting for the results.  We are both confident that she will do well on the real entrance tests, being she did so well on the practice exams. 

For more information about parenting teenagers and adolescents, see the "resources" section of this website, or go to articles about teens and adolescents.