If you are sitting the TSA, the likelihood is that you are already quite confident in examination technique. The advice that follows is just that: advice, which you can either take or leave.
Prior to the test, seek to optimise your alertness and comfort. Try to get plenty of sleep on the preceding night. Before walking into the test, eat something like a cereal bar or banana, drink some water, and empty your bladder.
Your attitude during the test is important, as it exerts a marked influence on your levels of motivation and concentration. Try to look at the test as something that is going to help rather than hinder your application, an opportunity to shine and stand out from your competition.
The questions in themselves are not actually that hard, particularly if you are well prepared. The real challenge is in fact the time pressure. You have 90 minutes in which to answer 50 questions, equating to an average of 108 seconds (1 minute 48 seconds) per question. Of course, some questions are much harder than others. You can bank time on easier questions, to reinvest on harder questions.
Every fifteen minutes or so, ensure that you are making good progress and that there remains sufficient time in which to complete the test. Don’t keep on checking the time, as this is distracting and in itself time consuming.
Don’t try to identify the type of each question and then answer the questions type by type. This is a high cost, low gain strategy. Instead, focus all your energies on arriving at the correct answers.
However, this does not mean that you need to work your way methodically from Question 1 to Question 50. If a particular question seems very hard or time-consuming, you can flag it for later review. Once you’ve run through the paper and picked up all the easier marks, you can come back to the harder questions with the benefit of knowing exactly how much time you’ve got left. In some cases, your subconscious will have identified a way of tackling the question while your conscious was busy working on other questions.
At the same time, you don’t want to be flagging too many questions for review. Each question that you flag is a question that you are going to have to come back to and re-read, and this, of course, is time-consuming.
One risk of not answering the questions serially is that you accidentally enter your answers in the wrong place on the answer grid. Familiarise yourself with the answer grid (you can find a copy on the Admissions Testing Service website). During the test, remember to check your answer grid as you go along and back and forth. Make sure that you have answered all the questions, and that you have only entered one answer per question!
Even though under pressure, make sure to read each question carefully. None of the stems are particularly long, so this shouldn’t be too onerous. In particular, make sure that you are quite clear about the question being posed. If you are being presented with data, check headings, labels, units, and any attached small print.
It’s hard to keep up your concentration right throughout the test. While reading a question, your mind may start spooling, leaving you ‘reading’ the question without really registering its meaning. To keep up your concentration, it can be helpful to actually voice the question in your inner mind, as though you were reading it out to a little child or a gathered audience. The stresses and intonations that you will naturally bring to the question will make it come alive in your mind’s eye.
Some people prefer reading the question first, and then reading the stem with the question already in mind. I naturally and inevitably do this; if you do as well, just make sure that you take in the full sense of the stem rather than simply ‘hunting down’ the answer—which may save time but can easily lead to error.
As there is no negative marking, you ought to answer every question. Even if you make a blind guess, you will stand a 20% chance of getting it right. In many cases, you will be making an educated guess between the two best answer options; in such cases, you will stand a greater than 50% chance of getting it right.
You can check an answer by confirming it (quickly working through the question again) or by rejecting the other four options. What you ought to do depends, first, on how much time you have left, and, second, on how confident you are in your answer.
The TSA scale applies the Rasch statistical technique to factor in the question and overall test difficulty and make scoring comparable across different versions of the test. During the test, don’t try to second-guess the level of difficulty ascribed to each question. Don’t divide your energies. Just answer every question as best as you can within the allocated time.
The typical candidate, who by definition is very able, will score around 60 on the TSA scale, which equates to about 32/50. If you are in the habit of scoring around the 80 or 90% mark in exams, you may well walk out of the test centre feeling as though you’ve flunked. The good news is, so will everyone else. Don’t let any unjustified negative feelings affect your test performance; and, after the test, don’t agonise over how you might have done. Remember that your TSA result is only one component of the selection decision, and that there are far worse things in life than not being admitted to a particular course at a particular university. So put the TSA out of your mind and focus your energies on life and on whatever tasks lie ahead.
Familiarity with the question types is key. In the weeks running up to the test, allocate a couple of hours each week for working through TSA-style questions. Don’t simply rely on your strengths: the best way to improve your score is to identify your weaknesses and work at them.
Also key is familiarity with the timing. To acquire this familiarity, make sure to put yourself through timed practice tests. This should give you a good feel for the time pressure that you will be under, and also help you to evolve scoring strategies that work for you (for example, how you pace yourself for your first run through the paper, and what sorts of questions you decide to flag for review). You can find past papers on the Admissions Testing Service website and mock papers in this and other books.
Some, although by no means all, of the critical reasoning questions in this book are perhaps more difficult than those in the TSA, but will hopefully reward you in more ways than one. In particular, I have chosen a number of passages in philosophy and psychology on the grounds that a lot of people sitting the TSA are applying or interested in those fields.
It might be a good idea to allow slightly less time for the practice tests than for the actual test, for example, 80 rather than 90 minutes. If you know that you can more or less complete the test in just 80 minutes, you will be that much more confident and relaxed during the real McCoy.