How to Use Practice Exams to Actually Improve Your Score

Practice exams work when you treat them as a tool for finding and fixing gaps, not as a score to chase. The routine that helps most is: take a diagnostic early, practise untimed while you learn, move to timed papers near the end, review every wrong answer, and stop when your results are stable. Here is how to do each step.

Why practice exams work at all

Trying to recall an answer strengthens memory more than reading the material again. Researchers call this the testing effect, and Roediger and Karpicke’s 2006 experiments are the classic demonstration. When Dunlosky and colleagues reviewed common study techniques in 2013, they rated practice testing as high-utility, and rereading and highlighting as low-utility.

A practice exam gives you that retrieval practice in the format of the real thing. It also shows you something rereading never will: what you do not know yet. The catch is that the benefit comes from the work you do around the test, not from sitting it. A score on its own teaches you very little.

Build the routine: diagnostic, untimed, timed

Step 1: Take a diagnostic before you feel ready

It feels wasteful to sit an exam on material you have not studied. Do it anyway, once, at the start.

• Use an untimed or generously timed paper so you see what you know rather than how fast you read.
• Do not guess randomly and move on. Mark questions where you were unsure, even if you got them right.
• Afterwards, group your misses by topic or exam domain.

The result is a map of where to spend your time. If an exam guide lists domains with weightings, compare your weak areas against those weightings and start with the heavy ones. Always read the official exam guide for current domains, since these change.

Step 2: Practise untimed while you learn

For most of your preparation, slow down. Untimed practice lets you think through each question, look up what you missed, and connect it back to the material.

A good rhythm is to study a topic, then answer questions on that topic straight away. This works better than saving all questions for a mock at the end, because the feedback arrives while the topic is fresh. It is also a simple form of interleaving if you later mix topics together, which research by Rohrer and Taylor found helps you tell similar ideas apart.

Two rules for untimed practice:

1. Commit to an answer before you check. Reading the answer first turns practice into rereading.
2. Write a one-line reason for each answer. If you cannot explain it, you probably guessed.

Step 3: Move to timed papers near the end

Timing is its own skill. Many people know the content but run out of time or freeze on hard questions. Timed papers train pacing and calm.

• Check the real exam’s length and number of questions in the official guide. For example, AWS lists the AI Practitioner exam (AIF-C01) as 65 questions in 90 minutes, and the Solutions Architect Associate (SAA-C03) as 65 questions in 130 minutes. Confirm current details before you plan.
• Work out your time per question and set a rule for skipping: flag a hard question, move on, return if time allows.
• Sit the paper in one go, with no phone and no lookups.

Start timed practice once your untimed accuracy is decent, not before. Sitting timed exams too early mainly teaches you to panic.

Learn from every attempt

Step 4: Review every wrong answer (and the lucky ones)

This is where most of the improvement happens, and where most people cut corners. After each paper:

• Go through every question you got wrong.
• Also review questions you got right but felt unsure about. A lucky guess hides a gap.
• For each, work out why the right answer is right and why each wrong option is wrong. Distractors are often correct statements that do not answer the question asked.

Then take action. If the miss reveals a knowledge gap, go back to the source material and fix it. If it was a misread question, note the trap. If it was a careless slip, that is useful data too.

Step 5: Keep an error log

An error log turns scattered misses into patterns. It can be a spreadsheet or a notes page with a row per mistake:

Question topic	What I chose	Correct answer	Why I got it wrong	Fix
Example domain	Option picked	Right option	Knowledge gap / misread / rushed	Review X, make a card

After a few papers, look for repeats. Maybe you keep mixing up two similar services, or you always miss “most cost-effective” wording. Those patterns tell you exactly what to study next.

Turn the log into flashcards. A missed fact becomes a card, and spaced repetition then brings it back before you forget it. If you are not sure how to write them, how to make good flashcards helps. An AI flashcard generator can draft cards from your notes, but read them before you trust them.

Avoid the traps: memorising and over-practising

Step 6: Avoid memorising the bank

Question banks are finite. If you see the same questions repeatedly, you start recognising them by phrasing and remembering the answer letter. Your score rises, but your knowledge may not.

Signs you are memorising rather than learning:

• You can answer before you finish reading the question.
• You remember the option’s position rather than its content.
• You score well on old papers and poorly on unfamiliar ones.

To counter it, explain answers in your own words, rewrite a question as a different scenario, and test yourself on fresh material that you have not seen. If you ever find yourself thinking “I’ve seen this one”, ask whether you could answer a differently worded version.

Step 7: Know when to stop

More practice is not always better. Reasonable signs you are ready:

• Your timed scores are steady over several papers, comfortably above the pass mark.
• Your error log shows few new kinds of mistakes.
• You can explain your answers without looking anything up.

Practice exam scores are an estimate, not a guarantee, and question banks differ in difficulty from the real thing. In the last few days, ease off: review your error log, sleep well, and do not sit a fresh full mock the night before. The last two weeks before an exam sets out a calm plan for that stretch.

One example: practice and exam modes

Some platforms separate the two styles above. In Lernoa’s exam simulator for certifications, for example, practice mode works through the whole question bank without a timer, with a check on each answer as you go. Exam mode is timed and draws domain-weighted questions, like a real sitting, and shows answers at the end. That mirrors the untimed-then-timed approach in this post, but you can follow the same method with any source of questions, including official sample papers. Browse the certification courses to see which exams have a simulator.

Try it

Pick one exam you are working towards, take a diagnostic this week, and start an error log with whatever you miss. If you want a place to turn those misses into flashcards that come back on schedule, Start free. The spaced-repetition flashcards are free, so you can start without paying.