Hearing that a customer has failed a crucial licensing or certification exam can be disheartening, both for the student and the education providers who champion their success. While frustrating, it's a common challenge in the world of professional education. However, an exam failure isn't an endpoint; it's a valuable data point. It signals that something in the learner's preparation strategy needs adjustment, presenting an opportunity for us, as education providers, to step in and coach them towards success on their next attempt. Helping a student navigate this setback requires more than just encouragement; it requires a structured approach to diagnose the issues and rebuild their confidence and study habits. This post outlines a practical study plan designed to guide learners through the recovery process, helping you empower them to turn this experience into a stepping stone for future achievement.

What to do if you fail an exam

If you fail an exam, it's not the end of the world, it just means something was missing in your original approach. It might mean you scored well on quizzes and practice exams but did so by memorizing questions and answers rather than fully learning the concepts behind them. This is common, hopefully, you were given some indication where you performed poorly to go back and work more in those areas. Hopefully, you will have access to some fresh questions that you have not seen before, which will help you work on those difficult areas with a new perspective. Go back and check, do your quiz scores and practice exams correlate with your performance in the areas in which you had difficulty on the real exam? If so, the process for fail recovery will be easier for you.

Learn the concepts. Don't memorize answers.

If you scored well on related quizzes and practice exams, but poorly on the real exam, it means you either had a bad test day, or you memorized question structure to get them right in your prep. Think back to the exam, did you feel like you were struggling between two choices, or did you feel completely lost? If you narrowed them down to what you felt was the correct answer and distractor, you should have a fairly straight path forward. Go back to your prep and make sure you understand where things went off the rails.

To teach is to fully understand the material

For exams with essay components, this is where knowing concepts and content is king. One way to help champion these difficult questions is to work with a study group where you each take a shot at teaching the class on a given set of essay topics. In this setting, you can evaluate each other and work collaboratively to fix areas where each person in the group was wrong or deficient in explanation. This takes time, but as the old adage states, teaching is knowing. You will fully learn and comprehend the material in your quest to teach it.

Focus your approach. You do not need to know it all.

With many high-stakes exams, it's nearly impossible to account for 100% of the content in which you will be tested. Using a good course and approach your goal should be to pass with the highest score in the shortest time possible. It could be you had a bad day, took the exam while sick, or went in with a sleep deficit. Fear not, exam prep is a state of being, its a state of working towards a goal and you are never finished until you pass.
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1. Assess where you are
   ‍Assess your strengths and weaknesses - when you do this, you will know where you need to focus your efforts. Any study without following this process wastes your time and takes you further from your goal of passing.
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2. ‍Avoid over-studying
   ‍Did you spend more than three or four hours per day studying? If so, there's a good chance a percentage of your learning was unproductive. If you know your strengths and weaknesses, you can work backward into a workable daily schedule, hopefully needing only two or three hours of focused effort per day leading up to the real exam. Be sure to take a day or two off to decompress. Time spent overstudying is not productive.

3. Reassess your progress
   ‍As you get closer to exam day, assess where you are again with a fresh set of questions all foundationally tied to the concepts you struggled with. This might mean a cheap cram course authored by someone really good. If you are using a legit course, they should have a quiz bank and exam bank big enough to give you fresh questions. If not, you need to look elsewhere. Seeing the same questions over and over again means you are memorizing patterns and not concepts.

4. Create a final review
   ‍Create another review 5-7 days before the real exam. This is a condensed final view of your weaknesses. Read and study this up until test time, then consolidate this down to a one or two page review to use right before the exam.

5. Parking lot review
   ‍Take your one or two-page consolidated review with you to the testing center or have it with you if your test is proctored from home. This material, for some reason, is not sticking in your mind, which is fine, it happens to most people. Study this information right up until the exam starts. If allowed, when you get in the testing center, write down on a blank piece of paper (once you are settled and just before the exam) those things you could only commit to short-term memory from the parking lot. Do this trust me it helps!!! You can refer to it, but there's a good chance you didn't need it. Be sure test monitors know you did not sneak notes in, and that you wrote them down once inside.

6. Exam day tactics
   ‍In the exam, mark and move; if you are able to answer questions quickly, and if in past assessments, your first answer is generally right, move on. Flag those questions you are getting stuck on and return to them at the end. This ensures you give yourself enough time to work through the layups before having to take tough shots.
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Avoid these common pitfalls

 📺 Listening to videos or audio while doing other things.
Passive learning is not active engagement. Active engagement is required to strengthen neural pathways necessary for future recall during exams.

📄 Memorizing question answers without understanding concepts.
This is a form of passive learning, consider using spaced repetition, where you give yourself time after reading the material before having to recall the information.

⛳ Placing too much emphasis on a single form of learning.
Some folks will spend the majority of time in a single form of study, such as only watching videos, only answering questions, only reading, or only using flashcards. If you have a delivery preference when it comes to learning information, that's fine and normal. Just be sure to expose yourself to all of the course tools to ensure you maximize the amount of active learning you engage in.

⌚ Spending too much time studying, more than five or ten hours a day.
Abundant study is not productive study, spending less time on proven learning strategies means you have a better result on exam day in a shorter period of time.

🗓️ Scheduling the practice exam too early
Be sure you know the material before taking the real thing. Sure, it's great to have a goal, but if your practice exam scores are not at least ten percentage points higher than the real exam, you may be putting yourself at risk.

⏳ Scheduling the practice exam too far out.
Just as you can schedule the exam without having enough time to prepare, you can also schedule it too far out where the forgetting curve will hurt your chances of passing. Having idle time can create boredom, especially if you find yourself daydreaming or worrying about other things because you are no longer excited or engaged with the learning material.