How to review an ESAT, TMUA or TARA mock

Look past the score

Your mark tells you how the paper went. Going through it question by question tells you why, and that's the part you can use.

Two students can get the same mark for very different reasons. One knows the content but doesn't finish. The other finishes with time to spare but uses methods that only work some of the time. The mark looks the same, but they need to practise completely different things.

Before you mark it

As soon as time is up, and before you look at any answers, go through the paper and put a mark next to every answer you guessed or weren't sure about. By tomorrow you won't remember, and once you've seen the answers it's hard to be honest with yourself about it.

If the paper didn't record your timings, also note the questions that took you much longer than the rest.

Sort every question into four groups

Now mark it and put each question into one of four groups: right and secure, right but slow, wrong after a sensible method, and wrong with no real way in.

Be strict about the first group. A question only counts as secure if you knew why your answer was right and it didn't take too long. If you guessed between two options and happened to pick the right one, review it with the others.

Each group needs something different. Secure questions need no more than a glance. Slow ones need a quicker method. Wrong after a sensible method means finding the exact line where it went wrong. Wrong with no way in usually means a gap in what you know, which needs learning before it needs practice.

Write down what went wrong

For every question outside the first group, write a short note saying what went wrong. Make it specific enough that you could build a practice set from it. 'Forgot probability' is too vague, but 'counted arrangements as if they were combinations' tells you exactly what to practise. 'Logic bad' won't help either. 'Answered the converse of what was asked' will.

The same goes for the TARA. 'Critical Thinking weak' gives you nothing to work on. 'Picked a statement that was relevant but didn't make the conclusion any stronger' gives you something to look out for next time.

Named mistakes also make progress easy to see. If one doesn't come up in your next two mocks, you can move on from it. If it keeps coming back, it goes to the top of your list.

Read the solution even when you got it right

Worked solutions are useful for right answers too. They show you whether your method was one you can afford in the time. In an admissions test, a careful five-minute solution is a poor habit even when it gets the right answer, because the time comes out of other questions.

When the solution is quicker than yours, find what should have told you to use it. It might have been the form of the answer options, a symmetry, the units, a factorisation, a counterexample or what happens at the edge of the range. Write that next to the question so you look for the same thing next time.

Check the fix later, under time

Don't count a weakness as fixed because the solution made sense when you read it. Do a small set of questions on just that point, then try it again inside a mixed, timed set where the topic isn't labelled.

Noetra is built to keep that cycle short: sit a mock, go through it, practise the weak spots, then sit another. You'll know you've improved when the same mistakes stop turning up in your next few papers.