Time Preparation Exam minus 6 months Take the CBEST Diagnostic in Chapter 3 and skim the 24 lessons in the Mini- Course. Based on your scores on the individual sections of the diagnostic exam, divide up the next 5 months into segments of time which you estimate each lesson will take. Be sure to schedule in more time on those skills that give you problems. Exam minus 6 months Work steadily and calmly through each lesson, sticking to your schedule and being to 2 months sure to do the practice exercises. Besides doing the lessons, be sure to read more during these months than you are accustomed to—novels, non-fiction books, mag- azines, newspapers; it is very important for the CBEST that your reading skills be honed. Also, look at the “More Help” section of the Mini-Course. Choose one or two books from the area that gives you the most trouble, and use them to help you improve your weak area. Exam minus 2 months Take the first practice exam, CBEST Practice Exam 1. Use your score to help you decide where to concentrate your efforts. Review the relevant lessons of the Mini- Course and get the help of a friend or teacher. If necessary, choose additional resources from the “More Help” section of the Mini-Course to help you. Exam minus 2 weeks Take the second practice test, CBEST Practice Exam 2, to see how much you’ve improved, and then, again, review the areas that give you the most trouble. Exam minus 1 day Relax. Do something unrelated to the exam. Eat a good meal and go to bed at your usual time. Schedule A: The Leisure Plan Time Preparation Exam minus 4 months Take the CBEST diagnostic in Chapter 3 and skim the 24 lessons in the Mini- Course. Based on your scores on the individual sections of the diagnostic exam, divide up the next 4 months into segments of time which you estimate each lesson will take. Be sure to schedule in more time on those skills that give you problems. Exam minus 4 months Work steadily and calmly through each lesson, sticking to your schedule and being to 1 month sure to do the practice exercises. Besides doing the lessons, schedule in more reading during these months than you’re used to doing—novels, non-fiction books, magazines, newspapers; it is very important for the CBEST that your reading skills be in top shape. If you fall behind in your schedule, remember that you’re in con- trol—it’s your schedule. Don’t shrug your shoulders and moan, “I’ll never make it!” Just take a look at the schedule, see where you went off track, revise the schedule for the time you have left, and continue. Exam minus 2 months Take the first practice exam, CBEST Practice Exam 1. Use your score to help you decide where to concentrate your efforts. Review the relevant lessons of the Mini- Course and get the help of a friend or teacher. If you need more help, choose addi- tional resources. Exam minus 2 weeks Take the second practice test, CBEST Practice Exam 2, to see how much you’ve improved, and then, again, review the areas that give you the most trouble. Exam minus 1 day Relax. Do something unrelated to the exam. Eat a good meal and go to bed at your usual time. Schedule B: The Just-Enough-Time Plan 13 Time Preparation Exam minus 2 months Take the CBEST diagnostic in Chapter 3 and skim the 24 lessons in the Mini- Course. Based on your scores on the individual sections of the diagnostic exam, divide up the next month into segments of time which you estimate each lesson will take. Be sure to schedule in more time on those skills that give you problems. Exam minus 2 months Work quickly, but steadily and calmly, through each lesson, sticking to your sched- to 1 month ule and being sure to do the practice exercises. Besides doing the lessons, sched- ule in more reading than you usually do—novels, non-fiction books, magazines, newspapers; it is crucial for the CBEST that your reading skills be their sharpest. If you fall behind in your schedule, remember that you are the one who devised the schedule, and you’re in control. Don’t take to your bed lamenting, “I can’t, I can’t!” Just peruse your schedule, see where you went astray, revise the schedule for the time you have left, and forge ahead. Exam minus 2 weeks Take the first practice exam, CBEST Practice Exam 1. Use your score to help you decide where to concentrate your efforts. Review the relevant lessons of the Mini- Course and get the help of a friend or teacher. If necessary, get more help. Exam minus 1 week Take the second practice test, CBEST Practice Exam 2, to see how much you’ve improved, and then, again, review the areas that give you the most trouble. Exam minus 1 day Relax. Do something unrelated to the exam. Eat a good meal and go to bed at your usual time. Schedule C: More Study in Less Time Time Preparation Exam minus 3 weeks Take the CBEST diagnostic in Chapter 3 and skim the 24 lessons in the Mini- Course. Based on your score, choose one area to concentrate on this week: read- ing, writing, or math. Spend an hour a day working on that area. Exam minus 2 weeks First, skim over the CBEST Mini-Course lessons on the areas you didn’t study last week. Choose 6 lessons to do in the first three days of this week. For the rest of the days, go back to the one area you need the most work on, and review the lessons that were most difficult for you. Exam minus 1 week Take the first practice exam, CBEST Practice Exam 1. Use your score to help you decide where to concentrate your efforts. Review the relevant lessons and get the help of a friend or teacher on those areas. Exam minus 3 days Take the second practice test, CBEST Practice Exam 2, to see how much you’ve improved, and then, again, review the areas that give you the most trouble. Exam minus 1 day Relax. Do something unrelated to the exam. Eat a good meal and go to bed at your usual time. Schedule D: The Cram Plan 14 Schedule C: More Study in Less Time If you have one to three months before the exam, you still have enough time for some concentrated study that will help you improve your score. This schedule is built around a two-month time frame. If you have only one month, spend an extra couple of hours a week to get all these steps in. If you have three months, take some of the steps from Schedule B and fit them in. Schedule D: The Cram Plan If you have three weeks or less before the exam, you really have your work cut out for you. Carve a half- hour out of your day, every day, for study. This sched- ule assumes you have the whole three weeks to prepare; if you have less time, you’ll have to compress the schedule accordingly. Step 4: Learn to Manage Your Time Time to complete: 10 minutes to read, many hours of practice! Activities: Practice these strategies as you take the sample tests in this book Steps 4, 5, and 6 of the LearningExpress Test Prepara- tion System put you in charge of your exam by show- ing you test-taking strategies that work. Practice these strategies as you take the sample tests in this book, and then you’ll be ready to use them on test day. First, you’ll take control of your time on the exam. The CBEST has a time limit of four hours, which may give you more than enough time to com- plete all the questions—or may not. It’s a terrible feel- ing to hear the examiner say,“Five minutes left,” when you’re only three-quarters of the way through the test. Here are some tips to keep that from happening to you. ■ Follow directions. If the directions are given orally, listen to them. If they’re written on the exam booklet, read them carefully. Ask questions before the exam begins if there’s anything you don’t understand. In your exam booklet, write down the beginning time and the ending time of the exam. ■ Pace yourself. Glance at your watch every ten or fifteen minutes, and compare the time to how far you’ve gotten in the exam. When one-quarter of the time has elapsed, you should be a quarter of the way through the exam, and so on. If you’re falling behind, pick up the pace a bit. ■ Keep moving. Don’t waste time on one question. If you don’t know the answer, skip the question and move on. Circle the number of the question in your test booklet in case you have time to come back to it later. ■ Keep track of your place on the answer sheet.If you skip a question, make sure you skip the cor- responding bubble on the answer sheet too. Check yourself every 5–10 questions to make sure the question number and the answer sheet num- ber are still the same. ■ Don’t rush. Though you should keep moving, rushing won’t help. Try to keep calm. Work methodically and quickly. Step 5: Learn to Use the Process of Elimination Time to complete: 20 minutes Activity: Complete worksheet on Using the Process of Elimination After time management, your next most important tool for taking control of your exam is using the –LEARNINGEXPRESS TEST PREPARATION SYSTEM– 15 process of elimination wisely. It’s standard test-taking wisdom that you should always read all the answer choices before choosing your answer. This helps you find the right answer by eliminating wrong answer choices. And, sure enough, that standard wisdom applies to your exam, too. Let’s say you’re facing a reading comprehension question that goes like this: 13. According to the passage above, “Biology uses a b ino mial system of classification.” In the context of the passage, the word b inomial most nearly means a. understanding the law. b. having two names. c. scientifically sound. d. having a double meaning. If you happen to know what binomial means, of course, you don’t need to use the process of elimina- tion, but let’s assume that you don’t. So you look at the answer choices. “Understanding the law” doesn’t sound likely for something having to do with biology. So you eliminate choice a—and now you only have three answer choices to deal with. Mark an X next to choice a so you never have to read it again. On to the other answer choices. If you know that the prefix bi- means two, as in bicycle, you’ll flag answer b as a possible answer. Mark a check mark beside it, meaning “good answer, I might use this one.” Choice c,“scientifically sound,” is a possibility.At least it’s about science, not law. It could work here, though, when you think about it, having a “scientifi- cally sound” classification system in a scientific field is kind of redundant.You remember the bi thing in bino- mial, and probably continue to like answer b better. But you’re not sure, so you put a question mark next to c, meaning “well, maybe.” Now, choice d,“having a double meaning.”You’re still keeping in mind that bi- means two, so this one looks possible at first. But then you look again at the sentence the word belongs in, and you think, “Why would biology want a system of classification that has two meanings? That wouldn’t work very well!” If you’re really taken with the idea that bi means two,you might put a question mark here. But if you’re feeling a little more confident, you’ll put an X. You’ve already got a better answer picked out. Now your question looks like this: 13. According to the passage above, “Biology uses a binomial system of classification.” In the context of the passage, the word binomial most nearly means Xa. understanding the law. ✓ b. having two names. ? c. scientifically sound. ? d. having a double meaning. You’ve got just one check mark, for a good answer. If you’re pressed for time, you should simply mark answer b on your answer sheet. If you’ve got the time to be extra careful, you could compare your check- mark answer to your question-mark answers to make sure that it’s better. (It is: the binomial system in biol- ogy is the one that gives a two-part genus and species name like homo sapiens.) It’s good to have a system for marking good, bad, and maybe answers. We’re recommending this one: X = bad ✓ = good ? = maybe If you don’t like these marks, devise your own system. Just make sure you do it long before test day—while you’re working through the practice exams in this book—so you won’t have to worry about it during the test. –LEARNINGEXPRESS TEST PREPARATION SYSTEM– 16 Using the Process of Elimination Use the process of elimination to answer the following questions. 1. d. You should have eliminated answer a imme- diately. Ilsa can’t be four years old if Meghan is going to be Ilsa’s age in five years. The best way to eliminate other answer choices is to try plugging them in to the information given in the problem. For instance, for answer b, if Ilsa is 10, then Meghan must be 5. The difference in their ages is 5. The differ- ence between Ed’s age, 29, and Meghan’s age, 5, is 24. Is 24 two times 5? No. Then answer b is wrong. You could eliminate answer c in the same way and be left with answer d. 2. c. Note the word not in the question, and go through the answers one by one. Is the truck driver in choice a “operating a commercial vehicle?” Yes, idling counts as “operating,” so he needs to have a commercial driver’s license. Likewise, the bus operator in answer b is operating a commercial vehicle; the question doesn’t say the operator has to be on the street. The limo driver in choice d is operating a commercial vehicle, even if it doesn’t have a passenger in it. However, the cabbie in answer c is not operating a com- mercial vehicle, but his own private car. Answers Here are the answers, as well as some suggestions as to how you might have used the process of elimination to find them. 17 1. Ilsa is as old as Meghan will be in five years. The difference between Ed’s age and Meghan’s age is twice the difference between Ilsa’s age and Meghan’s age. Ed is 29. How old is Ilsa? a. 4 b. 10 c. 19 d. 24 2. “All drivers of commercial vehicles must carry a valid commercial driver’s license whenever operating a commercial vehicle.” According to this sentence, which of the following people need NOT carry a commercial driver’s license? a. a truck driver idling his engine while waiting to be directed to a loading dock b. a bus operator backing her bus out of the way of another bus in the bus lot c. a taxi driver driving his personal car to the grocery store d. a limousine driver taking the limousine to her home after dropping off her last passenger of the evening 3. Smoking tobacco has been linked to a. increased risk of stroke and heart attack. b. all forms of respiratory disease. c. increasing mortality rates over the past ten years. d. juvenile delinquency. 4. Which of the following words is spelled cor- rectly? a. incorrigible b. outragous c. domestickated d. understandible 3. a. You could eliminate answer b simply because of the presence of the word all. Such absolutes hardly ever appear in correct answer choices. Choice c looks attractive until you think a little about what you know— aren’t fewer people smoking these days, rather than more? So how could smoking be responsible for a higher mortality rate? (If you didn’t know that mortality rate means the rate at which people die, you might keep this choice as a possibility, but you would still be able to eliminate two answers and have only two to choose from.) And choice d is plain silly, so you could eliminate that one, too. You are left with the correct choice, a. 4. a. How you used the process of elimination here depends on which words you recog- nized as being spelled incorrectly. If you knew that the correct spellings were outra- geous, domesticated, and understandable, then you were home free. 18 Even when you think you’re absolutely clueless about a question, you can often use the process-of- elimination technique to get rid of one answer choice. If so, you’re better prepared to make an educated guess, as you’ll see in Step 6. More often, the process of elim- ination allows you to get down to only two possibly right answers. Then you’re in a stronger position to guess. And sometimes, even though you don’t know the right answer, you find it simply by getting rid of the wrong ones, as you did in the example above. Try using your powers of elimination on the questions in the Using the Process of Elimination worksheet on the next page. The answer explanations there show one possible way you might use the process to arrive at the right answer. The process of elimination is your tool for the next step, which is knowing when to guess. Step 6: Know When to Guess Time to complete: 20 minutes Activity: Complete worksheet on Your Guessing Ability Armed with the Process of Elimination, you’re ready to take control of one of the big questions in test-taking: Should I guess? The first and main answer is “Yes.” Unless an exam has a so-called “guessing penalty,” you have nothing to lose and everything to gain from guessing. The more complicated answer depends on you—your personality and your “guessing intuition.” The CBEST doesn’t have a guessing penalty. The number of questions you answer correctly yields your score, and there’s no penalty for wrong answers. So simply go ahead and guess. But try not to guess wildly unless you absolutely have to. Remember to read the question carefully.You may know more about the sub- ject than you think. Use the process of elimination as outlined in Step 5. “Yes,” you might say, “but the whole idea of guessing makes me nervous. I’m not good at guessing.” Maybe, maybe not. Maybe you’re not much of a risk- taker, so you don’t like to guess. But remember, noth- ing bad can happen to you if you’re wrong. But maybe you really think you have lousy intu- ition. It seems like, when you have to guess, you always guess wrong! Test out your assumption about your guessing ability. Complete the Your Guessing Ability worksheet to get an idea of how good or bad your intu- ition really is. Remember, nothing can happen to you if you’re wrong. Using the Process of Elimination (continued) . strategies as you take the sample tests in this book Steps 4, 5, and 6 of the LearningExpress Test Prepara- tion System put you in charge of your exam by show- ing you test- taking strategies that work sure you do it long before test day—while you’re working through the practice exams in this book—so you won’t have to worry about it during the test. –LEARNINGEXPRESS TEST PREPARATION SYSTEM– 16 Using. for taking control of your exam is using the –LEARNINGEXPRESS TEST PREPARATION SYSTEM– 15 process of elimination wisely. It’s standard test- taking wisdom that you should always read all the answer choices