Preparing for Your Test

There is all sorts of good general test prep advice out there: get a good night’s rest, spend an hour or so reading before bed, eat healthy, read the question and all of the answers thoroughly, etc. But the following are some great tips to improve your performance on the Workplace Readiness Skills or the California Career Ready assessments specifically:

1. Pace yourself. If you are given no accommodations, that means, in one hour you have 36 seconds per question. Look at your timer when you are about half-way through and try to adjust your speed at that time.
2. Longer questions. If you happen to be a slow reader, no problem. Just mark longer questions for review. Do not try to answer them at all. After you answer all the shorter questions, the test will tell you that you have unanswered questions.
3. Take the entire test in Review mode. This helps you avoid getting one question per screen and needing to manually advance. Review mode runs all questions down the scrolled length of just one screen.
4. Take a refresher. There are going to be skills that you know pretty well, and some you don’t. Familiarize yourself with the complete list again by going to the module page for each, right on the Practice page of this site. Study not just the skill name, but how it’s defined. Take the vocabulary quizzes and or complete an activity or two.
5. Take the sample test questions provided on the same root page. Study the skill areas you are getting wrong.
6. Use your teacher-provided reports. If you’ve taken a version of the test before your next test, whether it was a pre-test or a failed post-test or retake, you will want to be able to identify those areas on which you did poorly. Focus on those skills and follow #5 above.
7. Math. Across the board, students seem to perform poorly on the mathematics skill questions. A basic equation refresher could help. These are not advanced mathematics questions but common to most every workplace in some way: addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, percentages. Also, remember you have a calculator on the testing window itself.
8. Review at the end. If you have additional time, use it to check your answers before you submit your test for grading. This will also help you catch those unanswered questions which the test itself make you aware of.

One last thing. Go ahead and request the digital badge (currently available in Virginia, but potentially coming to other states) if you are successful in passing the test. Put in a personal email and then follow the email prompts you get to open your account and claim and share your badge. And finally, don’t worry, you got this.