Sometimes your brain can get tied up with worry over whether you know a lot of background information about the subject of a question. Don’t let that happen.

A test question we were recently working with had all sorts of complicated calculations about gravity. We couldn’t really work out what they were getting at right away, but we went on to the questions anyway. Why? Two reasons.

First, the questions might not ask you about those details, and so there was no reason to waste precious time picking up all that information when we might not have needed it anyway.

Second, these tests will rarely expect you to have a bunch of esoteric information that you spent ten minutes studying last semester. They want to know if you have the basics down, and if you can solve puzzles.

As it turned out, they had given us everything we needed to know, without having to derive how they came to their formula for calculating the problem. It was more a matter of reading information from a graph, and solving a puzzle. In fact, someone with only a basic math background and little knowledge of how gravity works, could have answered this question if they didn’t waste precious time worrying about the philosophy behind the numbers and what Newton would think of them for not knowing everything.

But the only reason this worked for us was because we had experience with tests. When we first started working with these things, we would instantly go into a panic arising from how much we forgot from science class and how little time we had to get it back. There was even a little whiff of panic in the air when we first saw this problem. But the training kicked in before there was any real hysteria. After seeing this sort of thing a hundred times in practice, the next thought was that we probably wouldn’t need too much background on the math. So we went on without worrying about whether we understood every last detail, or whether this measurement was found at sea level, on top of Everest, or maybe some planet whose mass we didn’t know.

Calm ensued, along with a quick point because we had nailed the answer. And all of this came from practice and taking the time to learn good test strategies.