Test Preparation System for The Paramedic Certification Exam

Step 2: Conquer Test Anxiety

Overcome one of the biggest obstacles to test success: anxiety! Test anxiety can not only impair your performance on the exam itself, but it can even keep you from preparing! In Step 2, you’ll learn stress-management techniques that will help you succeed on your exam. Learn these strategies now and practice them as you work through the exams in this book, so they’ll be second nature to you by exam day.

Combating Test Anxiety

The first thing you need to know is that a little test anxiety is a good thing. Everyone gets nervous before a big exam—and if that nervousness motivates you to prepare thoroughly, so much the better. It’s said that Sir Laurence Olivier, one of the foremost British actors of last century, was ill before every performance. His stage fright didn’t impair his performance; in fact, it probably gave him a little extra edge—just the kind of edge you need to do well, whether on a stage or in an examination room.

Stress Management before the Test

If you feel your level of anxiety getting the best of you in the weeks before the test, here is what you need to do to bring the level down again: 

• Get prepared. There’s nothing like knowing what to expect and being prepared for it to put you in control of test anxiety. That’s why you’re reading this book. Use it faithfully, and remind yourself that you’re better prepared than most of the people taking the test.
• Practice self- confidence. A positive attitude is a great way to combat test anxiety. This is no time to be humble or shy. Stand in front of the mirror and say to your reflection, “I’m prepared. I’m full of self- confidence. I’m going to ace this test. I know I can do it.” Say it into a tape recorder and play it back once a day. If you hear it often enough, you’ll believe it.
• Fight negative messages. Every time someone starts telling you how hard the exam is or how it’s almost impossible to get a high score, start telling them your self- confidence messages. If that someone is you, telling yourself you don’t do well on exams, you just can’t do this, don’t listen. Turn on your tape recorder and listen to your self- confidence messages.
• Visualize. Imagine yourself reporting for duty on your first day as a paramedic. Think of yourself responding to calls, interacting with patients, preserving health, and saving lives. Visualizing success can help make it happen— and it reminds you of why you’re doing all this work preparing for the exam.
• Exercise. Physical activity helps calm your body down and focus your mind. Besides, being in good physical shape can actually help you do well on the exam. Go for a run, lift weights, go swimming—and do it regularly.

Stress Management on Test Day

Several techniques can bring down your level of anxiety on test day. They’ll work best if you practice them in the weeks before the test, so you know which ones work best for you.

• Deep breathing. Take a deep breath while you count to five. Hold it for a count of one, then let it out on a count of five. Repeat several times. 
• Move your body. Try rolling your head in a circle. Rotate your shoulders. Shake your hands from the wrist. Many people find these movements very relaxing.
• Visualize again. Think of the place where you are most relaxed: lying on the beach in the sun, walking through the park, or whatever. Now close your eyes and imagine you’re actually there. If you practice in advance, you’ll find that you only need a few seconds of this exercise to experience a significant increase in your sense of well- being.

When anxiety threatens to overwhelm you in the middle of the exam, there are additional things you can do to manage the stress level: 

• Repeat your self- confidence messages. You should have them memorized by now. Say them quietly to yourself, and believe them!
• Visualize one more time. This time, visualize yourself moving smoothly and quickly through the test, answering every question correctly, and finishing just before time is up. Like most visualization techniques, this one works best if you’ve practiced it ahead of time.
• Find an easy question. Skim over the test until you find an easy question, and answer it. Filling in even one circle gets you into the test- taking groove.
• Take a mental break. Everyone loses concentration once in a while during a long test. It’s normal, so you shouldn’t worry about it. Instead, accept what has happened. Say to yourself, “Hey, I lost it there for a minute. My brain is taking a break.” Close your eyes and do some deep breathing for a few seconds. Then you’re ready to go back to work.

Try these techniques ahead of time, and watch them work for you!

Step 3: Make a Plan

Construct a study plan

Maybe the most important thing you can do to get control of yourself and your exam is to make a study plan. Too many people fail to prepare simply because they fail to plan. Spending hours on the day before the exam poring over sample test questions not only raises your level of test anxiety, but also is no substitute for careful preparation and practice over time.

Don’t fall into the cram trap. Take control of your preparation time by mapping out a study schedule. On the following pages are two sample schedules, based on the amount of time you have before you take the EMT-Paramedic cognitive exam. If you’re the kind of person who needs deadlines and assignments to motivate you for a project, here they are. If you’re the kind of person who doesn’t like to follow other people’s plans, you can use the suggested schedules here to construct your own.

Even more important than making a plan is making a commitment. You can’t review everything you learned in your paramedic course in one night. You have to set aside some time every day for study and practice. Try for at least 20 minutes a day. Twenty minutes daily will do you much more good than two hours on Saturday. Don’t put off your studying until the day before the exam. Start now. A few minutes a day, with half an hour or more on weekends, can make a big difference in your score.

Step 4: Learn to Manage Your Time

First, you’ll take control of your time on the exam. EMT-Paramedic exams have a two-and-a-halfhour time limit, which may give you more than enough time to complete all the questions—or may not. Here are some tips.

• Follow directions. If the directions are given orally, listen to them. Ask questions before the exam begins if there’s anything you don’t understand.
• Read the entire question first. You should read the whole question first at least twice and formulate the answer in your head before you look at the answer choices. If you look at the answer choices before you understand the question, you might choose incorrectly.
• Look out for qualifiers. Take note of words like except, always, never, or most appropriate. These words limit the potential answers and can help you determine an answer more efficiently.
• Keep moving. Don’t linger on one question for too long. Remember, though, once you skip a question you cannot come back to it later.
• Do not make questions more complicated than they are. You should not bring elements into a question that are not there. This will cause you to overlook the basics, which is probably what the question is testing.
• Don’t rush. Though you should keep moving, rushing won’t help. Try to keep calm and work methodically and quickly.

Step 5: Learn to Use the Process of Elimination

After time management, the next most important tool for taking control of your exam is using the 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 question that goes like this:

13. Which of the following lists of signs and symptoms indicates cardiac compromise?

a. headache, dizziness, nausea, confusion

b. dull chest pain, sudden sweating, difficulty breathing

c. wheezing, labored breathing, chest pain

d. difficulty breathing, high fever, rapid pulse

You should always use the process of elimination on a question like this, even if the right answer jumps out at you. Sometimes, the answer that jumps out isn’t right after all. Let’s assume, for the purpose of this exercise, that you’re a little rusty on your signs and symptoms of cardiac compromise, so you need to use a little intuition to make up for what you don’t remember. Proceed through the answer choices in order. 

So you start with choice a. This one is pretty easy to eliminate; none of these signs and symptoms is consistent with cardiac compromise.

On to the next. “Dull chest pain” looks good, though if you’re not up on your cardiac signs and symptoms, you might wonder if it should be “acute chest pain” instead. “Sudden sweating” and “difficulty breathing”? Check. Make the following mental note: “Good answer, I might use this one.”

Choice c is a possibility. Maybe you don’t really expect wheezing in cardiac compromise, but you know “chest pain” is right, and let’s say you’re not sure whether “labored breathing” is a sign of cardiac difficulty. In your head, put a question mark next to c, meaning, “Well, maybe.”

Choice d strikes you about the same, with “difficulty breathing” being a good sign of cardiac compromise. But wait a minute. “High fever”? Not really. “Rapid pulse”? Well, maybe. This doesn’t really sound like cardiac compromise, and you’ve already got a better answer picked out in choice b. If you’re feeling sure of yourself, mentally put an X next to this one. If you want to be careful, put a question mark.

In your head, your question looks like this:

13. Which of the following lists of signs and symptoms indicates cardiac compromise?

X a. headache, dizziness, nausea, confusion

✔ b. dull chest pain, sudden sweating, difficulty breathing

? c. wheezing, labored breathing, chest pain ?

d. difficulty breathing, high fever, rapid pulse

You’ve got just one good answer. If you’re pressed for time, you should simply select choice b. If you’ve got the time to be extra careful, you could compare your good answer to your question mark answers to make sure that it’s better.

Even when you think you’re absolutely clueless about a question, you can often use the process of elimination 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 elimination allows you to get down to only two possibly right answers. Then you’re in a strong 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 previous example.

Step 6: Know When to Guess

Armed with the process of elimination, you’re ready to take control of one of the big questions in testtaking: Should I guess? The first and main answer is yes. Some exams have what’s called a “guessing penalty,” in which a fraction of your wrong answers is subtracted from your right answers—but the EMT-Paramedic exam does not work like that. The number of questions you answer correctly yields your competency or incompetency. So you have nothing to lose and everything to gain by guessing.

The more complicated answer to the question “Should I guess?” depends on you—your personality and your “guessing intuition.” There are two things you need to know about yourself before you go into the exam:

• Are you a risktaker?
• Are you a good guesser?

You’ll have to decide about your risk- taking quotient on your own. Frankly, even if you’re a play- it- safe person with lousy intuition, you’re still safe in guessing every time. The best thing would be if you could overcome your anxieties and go ahead and pick an answer. But you may want to have a sense of how good your intuition is before you go into the exam.

Step 7: Reach Your Peak Performance Zone

To get ready for a challenge like a big exam, you have to take control of your physical, as well as your mental, state. Exercise, proper diet, and rest will ensure that your body works with, rather than against, your mind on test day, as well as during your preparation.

Exercise

If you don’t already have a regular exercise program going, the time during which you’re preparing for an exam is actually an excellent time to start one. And if you’re already keeping fit—or trying to get that way— don’t let the pressure of preparing for an exam fool you into quitting now. Exercise helps reduce stress by pumping wonderful good- feeling hormones called endorphins into your system. It also increases the oxygen supply throughout your body, including your brain, so you’ll be at peak performance on test day.

A half hour of vigorous activity—enough to raise a sweat—every day should be your aim. If you’re really pressed for time, every other day is okay. Choose an activity you like and get out there and do it. Jogging with a friend always makes the time go faster, or take an iPod or MP3 player.

But don’t overdo it. You don’t want to exhaust yourself. Moderation is the key.

Diet

First of all, cut out the junk. Go easy on caffeine and nicotine, and eliminate alcohol and any other drugs from your system at least two weeks before the exam.

What your body needs for peak performance is simply a balanced diet. Eat plenty of fruits and vegetables, along with protein and complex carbohydrates. Foods high in lecithin (an amino acid), such as fish and beans, are especially good “brain foods.”

The night before the exam, you might “carbo- load” the way athletes do before a contest. Eat a big plate of spaghetti, rice and beans, or whatever your favorite carbohydrate is.

Rest

You probably know how much sleep you need every night to be at your best, even if you don’t always get it. Make sure you do get that much sleep, though, for at least a week before the exam. Moderation is important here, too. Extra sleep will just make you groggy.

If you’re not a morning person and your exam will be given in the morning, you should reset your internal clock so that your body doesn’t think you’re taking an exam at 3 a.m. You have to start this process well before the exam. Here’s how it works: Get up half an hour earlier each morning, and then go to bed half an hour earlier that night. Don’t try it the other way around; you’ll just toss and turn if you go to bed early without having gotten up early. The next morning, get up another half an hour earlier, and so on. How long you will have to do this depends on how late you’re used to getting up.

Step 8: Get Your Act Together

Now it’s time to take charge of external factors, such as the testing site and the materials you need to take the exam.

Find out Where the Test Is and Make a Trial Run

The testing agency or your EMS instructor will notify you when and where your exam is being held. Do you know how to get to the testing site? Do you know how long it will take to get there? If not, make a trial run, preferably on the same day of the week at the same time of day. Make note of the amount of time it will take you to get to the exam site. Plan on arriving 10–15 minutes early so you can get the lay of the land, use the bathroom, and calm down. Then figure out how early you will have to get up that morning, and make sure you get up that early every day for a week before the exam.

Gather Your Materials

The night before the exam, lay out the clothes you will wear and the materials you have to bring with you to the exam. Plan on dressing in layers; you won’t have any control over the temperature of the examination room. Have a sweater or jacket you can take off if it’s warm.

Don’t Skip Breakfast

Even if you don’t usually eat breakfast, do so on exam morning. A cup of coffee doesn’t count. Don’t eat doughnuts or other sweet foods, either. A sugar high will leave you with a sugar low in the middle of the exam. A mix of protein and carbohydrates is best: Cereal with milk or eggs with toast will do your body a world of good.

Step 9: Do It!

Ace the EMT-Paramedic exam! Fast-forward to exam day. You’re ready. You made a study plan and followed through. You practiced your test- taking strategies while working through this book. You’re in control of your physical, mental, and emotional states. You know when and where to show up and what to bring with you. In other words, you’re better prepared than most of the other people taking the EMT-Paramedic exam. You’re psyched.

Just one more thing. When you’re done with the exam, you will have earned a reward. Plan a celebration. Call up your friends and plan a party, have a nice dinner for two, or go see a good movie—whatever your heart desires. Give yourself something to look forward to.

And then do it. Go into the exam, full of confidence, armed with test- taking strategies you’ve practiced till they’re second nature. You’re in control of yourself, your environment, and your performance on the exam. You’re ready to succeed. So do it. Go in there and ace the exam. And look forward to your career as a paramedic!