Though their exams have never been correlated with safety or effectiveness in clinical practice, license exam developers continue to insist that their exams are good measures of knowledge in mental health care. They also insist that their measures are specific. That is, they measure only knowledge of the profession being tested. As ASWB puts it, “there are no secrets or tricks” to passing licensing exams.
They’re wrong. Decades of research have shown test-taking skills, separate from specific knowledge of the content being tested, can make a significant difference in your score on a multiple-choice exam. That difference can be the difference between passing and failing. Some studies have demonstrated this specifically within licensing exams for mental health care.
This was most dramatically shown in a recent study of the ASWB Clinical Exam. Researchers demonstrated that an artificial intelligence model could successfully pass the test in two out of three attempts (its score was marginal in the other) without even seeing the questions being asked. It was responding only to clues and patterns in the response options.
You can harness this research to your benefit if you know how to read and respond to multiple-choice questions, and some of the ways in which exam developers try to make incorrect answers look appealing.
Useful research findings
Here are just a couple of things research tends to show:
For most examinees, but not all, changing answers is more likely to help you than hurt you. There are some caveats on this, so we have a whole separate article about it. But in short, changing answers tends to be helpful, especially if your revised answer is based on meaningful reflection surrounding the question, and not just an alternative guess.
Use an Assimilator learning style. Assimilators tend to use a concise, logical approach to gathering and applying new information. That’s a good natural fit for multiple choice exams, where you can be most efficient if you rely on specific facts, rules, and logic in determining the best answer. Experimentation and intuitive learning are less likely to be effective for multiple-choice tests. Even when they lead you to a correct answer, they may take longer to get you there.
Figure out the specific kinds of mistakes you’re making. One of the reasons why reviewing rationales for practice questions is so helpful is because you can see where you made mistakes. If you can find patterns in your errors, you can resolve those patterns, and make yourself more likely to do better overall in the future.
Our exam prep programs can help you with all of these. We give you specific, personalized data on whether changing answers helped you or hurt you in each exam attempt. We provide rationales for all practice questions, so you can see the logic underlying each question. (Our Think Like the Test® video also explains in more detail how questions are made, and how incorrect answers are made to look appealing.) And our practice exam report provides you with a specific summary of the type of error you were most likely to make, and how you can address that in your studying.
Our test-taking skills reporting and our Think Like the Test® video segments are available exclusively in the online exam prep programs at High Pass Education. Learn more about our programs here.
