The ten minutes after a wrong answer are worth more than the hour before it
Getting a question wrong opens a short window in which the correct answer sticks unusually well. Most study routines close it immediately.
Watch someone work through practice questions and count how long they spend on the ones they get wrong. Usually it is less time than they spend on the ones they get right, because a wrong answer is unpleasant and moving on feels like progress.
This is exactly backwards. A correct answer confirms something you already had. A wrong answer has located something you did not have, which is far more expensive information and far more perishable.
Why the window is short
When you answer a question wrong, you did so for a reason. Some chain of reasoning, or some half-remembered fact, made the wrong option look right. That chain is available to you for about as long as you can remember taking it, and then it is gone.
Read the explanation two days later and you learn the correct answer. Read it immediately and you learn the correct answer plus the specific reason your own reasoning failed, which is the part that generalises to the next question.
What to do with a wrong answer
- 1
Get it wrong
The useful moment. Do not move on.
- 2
Name your reasoning
Why did the wrong option look right? Answer this before reading anything.
- 3
Read the explanation
Now it lands against a specific error rather than into a vacuum.
- 4
Write one line
The distinction you missed, in your own words, not the explanation's.
- 5
Meet it again later
Days later, not minutes. Immediate repetition tests your short-term memory and nothing else.
Answer wrongly, then before reading anything, name why your choice was attractive. Then read the explanation. Then write the distinction in one line. Then meet the same item again several days later.
Write the wrong reason, not the right one
Almost every error log we have seen records the correct answer. Very few record why the wrong answer was appealing, and that is the more useful of the two.
The usual error log
- Question number and topic
- The correct answer
- A copy of the explanation
- Reread once, if at all
- Tells you nothing you could not look up
An error log that works
- The distinction you missed, in one line
- Why your wrong option looked right
- Which of the four causes it was
- Reread before every mock
- Tells you about your own reasoning, which is not in any book
This is why explanations are not optional
A question bank without explanations can only tell you whether you were right. It cannot tell you why you were wrong, which means it can measure you but not teach you. That distinction is why every item in our banks carries an explanation, and why we treat a missing one as a defect rather than a gap.
I had done four thousand questions. I could not have told you a single thing I had learned from getting one wrong.
A review habit that takes four minutes an item
- 1
Pause before the explanation
Say to yourself, in words, why you chose what you chose. Thirty seconds. This is the step that gets skipped.
- 2
Read the explanation properly
Not the answer letter. The reasoning. If the explanation does not address why your option was wrong, that is the bank's failure, not yours.
- 3
Write one line in your own words
Not a copy. A line you would understand in six weeks, describing the distinction rather than the fact.
- 4
Schedule the item to return
Several days out. Any decent practice tool will do this for you; a notebook and a date will do it just as well.
Frequently asked questions
- Should I redo a question immediately after getting it wrong?
- No. An immediate retry tests short-term memory of the explanation you just read. Schedule the item to return after several days, which is when a correct answer means something.
- What should an error log contain?
- The distinction you missed in your own words, why your wrong option was attractive, and which cause it was. The correct answer alone is the least useful thing you can record.
- How much time should reviewing take?
- Around four minutes per wrong item, which is far more than most people spend and far less than re-studying the whole topic.
- Are practice questions without explanations useful?
- They can measure you. They cannot teach you. The whole value of a wrong answer is in the moment immediately after it, and a bank without explanations cannot fill that moment.