Why I Failed Practice Exams Before I Started Passing Them

When I first started taking practice exams, I hated seeing a bad score. You take a 60-question practice exam, see that you failed, and immediately start thinking, How am I ever going to pass the real exam?

But eventually I realized something important: the goal of a practice exam is not to prove that you already know everything. The goal is to find out what you don't know. This is where I see a lot of people cheating themselves.

They take a practice question, don't know the answer, and immediately ask AI for the answer or search online until somebody gives it to them. Sure, now you know the answer to that one question. But did you actually learn how to find it?

On the real contractor exam, AI isn't sitting next to you. You have your books. When I got a question wrong, I started forcing myself to go into the book and find the answer myself. I would think about what subject the question was asking about, which book it probably came from, and what keyword I could search for in the index.

Then once I found it, I would highlight that section and sometimes add a tab that would help me find that information faster next time. That process is what actually made me better. Sometimes spending five or ten minutes looking for one answer taught me more than getting ten questions correct.

You start learning your books. You learn where certain topics are located. You learn what words to look for in the index. You start understanding how the exam is written and where the question is trying to send you. So don't be afraid to fail your practice exams. Actually, especially in the beginning, you should expect to fail some of them.

The important part is what you do after you get the question wrong. Don't just look at the correct answer and move on. Don't immediately ask AI. Don't cheat yourself out of the most important part of studying. Find it in the book yourself. Highlight it. Tab it if necessary. Figure out how you would find it again during the real exam.

That's when my scores started improving. Not because I was studying more hours. I was finally practicing the skill that actually mattered: finding the answer.

• Cruz Vinci