Practice questions: how to write ones that actually teach you something
Practice questions are questions you answer without looking at the material, to test whether you actually know it. They work because retrieval itself strengthens the memory – Roediger and Karpicke (2008) found a single self-test beat repeated rereading substantially a week later. Good practice questions are open-ended, aimed at understanding rather than definition, and answered before you feel ready.
Key takeaways
- Retrieving from memory strengthens learning more than rereading – the testing effect.
- Good questions are open-ended and start with why and how, not what.
- Ten to fifteen questions per chapter, answered repeatedly with gaps, is enough.
- Write the hardest questions yourself and generate the rest from your own material.
What are practice questions?
Practice questions are questions built from a section of course material that you answer from memory to check your understanding. They differ from notes on one decisive point: notes are how you take information in, practice questions are how you pull it back out.
That difference is not semantic. Rereading your notes produces a strong feeling of knowing, because the text feels familiar. Recognition and retrieval are two different abilities, and it is retrieval the exam measures. Practice questions are the cheapest way to stop confusing them.
Why do they work so well?
Three findings explain the effect, and they all point the same way.
The testing effect. Henry Roediger and Jeffrey Karpicke (2008) had students either reread a passage repeatedly or read it once and then test themselves. A week later the testing group remembered dramatically more, despite spending less time reading. Retrieving a memory changes it; rereading does not.
The generation effect. Norman Slamecka and Peter Graf (1978) showed that material you produce yourself is remembered better than material you read. Which means a question you wrote yourself has already produced a learning effect before you even answer it.
It holds up in practice. John Dunlosky and colleagues (2013) reviewed ten common study techniques and ranked practice testing among the two most effective of all – while highlighting and rereading, the two most popular, landed near the bottom.
What makes a good practice question?
A good practice question cannot be answered by recognition. It requires you to produce the answer. Four properties separate a useful question from a pointless one:
| Property | Weak question | Strong question |
|---|---|---|
| Open, not yes/no | "Is osmosis passive transport?" | "What drives osmosis, and why is no energy required?" |
| Demands explanation | "What does GDP mean?" | "Why is GDP a poor measure of welfare?" |
| Connects concepts | "Define validity." | "How can a study have high reliability but low validity?" |
| Tests application | "What is a confidence interval?" | "The sample size doubles. What happens to the interval width, and why?" |
The pattern in the right-hand column is consistent: the questions start with why and how rather than what. Definition questions have their place, but only as a floor. The difference between grades sits at the level above the definition.
How do you turn a whole chapter into questions?
Work heading by heading and keep the book closed as much as you can.
- Turn every subheading into a question. "Marginal cost" becomes "What is marginal cost and why does it determine the profit-maximising quantity?". The headings are the author's own index of what matters.
- Write one question per figure and table. Figures are examined more often than students expect, and "what does this curve show as x increases?" is hard to bluff.
- Add one comparison question per chapter. "What distinguishes X from Y?" targets exactly the confusions that cost marks.
- Write the answer separately, never beside the question. A visible answer turns the whole exercise back into rereading.
Budget ten to fifteen questions per chapter. More than that becomes a wall of text you will not return to, and the entire point is answering them more than once.
When should you answer them?
Earlier than feels comfortable, and repeatedly with gaps in between. Getting a question wrong before you have finished reading is not a failure – Robert Bjork calls it a desirable difficulty: a failed attempt makes the answer stick better when you do see it.
Mix questions from several sections in the same session rather than working one chapter at a time. Doug Rohrer and Kelli Taylor (2007) showed interleaved practice feels harder during the session but produces clearly better test results, because you are forced to choose the method rather than just execute it.
How to avoid writing every question by hand
The honest objection to practice questions is the time cost: writing a hundred questions before an exam takes hours you would rather spend answering them. The generation effect argues for writing some yourself; it does not justify writing all of them.
Upload your lecture notes, handouts or your own summaries and Memmo can generate quiz questions on exactly that material – on what your course actually covers, rather than a generic subject bank. Run them as flashcards and the review is scheduled with FSRS, the same algorithm family Anki moved to, so each question returns just before you would have forgotten it.
A sensible split: write the ten questions you find hardest to phrase – those sit in the concepts you understand least – and generate the rest. More on the mechanism in our guide to active recall, and if you want to see how this fits into revision as a whole we have a guide to planning for the exam.
Frequently asked questions
What are practice questions?
Practice questions are questions built from your course material that you answer from memory, without looking, to check what you actually know. They are a revision tool rather than an assessment, and while textbooks sometimes supply them, they are often worth more when you write them yourself.
How many practice questions do you need?
Ten to fifteen per chapter is usually enough. The point is answering the same questions several times with gaps in between, not building the most exhaustive list possible – a list of two hundred becomes a text you read through, which is precisely what the method is meant to replace.
Are practice questions better than rereading?
Yes, by a clear margin. Dunlosky and colleagues (2013) ranked self-testing among the two most effective of ten study techniques reviewed, while rereading and highlighting scored poorly. Rereading feels more effective because the text becomes familiar, but familiarity is not the same as being able to retrieve the knowledge.
Should you write practice questions yourself?
Some of them, yes. Slamecka and Graf (1978) showed that self-produced material is remembered better, so the act of phrasing a question is itself learning. But it scales badly across a whole module – a reasonable compromise is writing the hardest questions yourself and generating the rest from your course material.