GIGIILO wrote:What is the best material to buy for self study? What do you do for the future in regards to full tests when you have gone through all of them briefing question types? How do I take a PT and use it as evidence if I remember answers from previous study?
I see questions like this come up quite often, and I actually disagree with the conventional wisdom. A few points:
1) Who cares if your practice test is not a reliable indicator of how well you will do on the actual test. The goal is to do well on the actual test, not to be able to predict what your score will be.
2) I find it highly unlikely that anyone will remember the answers to specific questions short of repeating a test immediately after completing it or working the same material tons of times. There are too many questions with similar content, and so little time is spent on each question (even taking account of review time), that having a strong enough memory of answers to individual questions so that you can answer without solving is highly unlikely.
3) If you do remember anything, it wont be answers, but will likely be reasoning/strategies used to reach answers. This is actually a good thing since many questions use similar reasoning and strategies tend to work on multiple questions (I had a professor who once said a trick is something that works less than three times, a strategy is something that works three or more times). Redoing questions where you remember some of the reasoning/strategies will only help you learn those aspects of the test even better. Furthermore, the reason it is good to do many practice tests (related to content - timing, etc. issues aside) is to make sure you expose yourself to as much of the test as you can, not because you need to always be working on something foreign.
4) On the off chance that you do remember with a fair degree of certainty the answer to a specific question on a PT, all is not lost on that question. Your goal is to get good at solving questions, so you can force yourself to solve the question even though you know what the answer is. Thus you will get practice anyway.