"Do lots of practice questions" is the most common exam advice there is, and it is correct. It is also useless when you are trying to plan an actual week. How many is lots? All in one sitting or spread out? The same questions again, or new ones? What counts as done?
This article gives a concrete answer. It is not a magic number, because none exists, but it is a way to work out the right amount for your exam, plus a 7-day schedule you can copy.
The short answer
For each topic on the exam, aim to answer every important idea correctly at least three times, on at least three different days, with the last correct attempt no more than a couple of days before the exam.
In practice that usually means around 30 to 60 questions per topic across the week, split into short quizzes of 10 to 20, not one long session. A topic that takes up a single lecture sits at the low end; a topic that took three weeks of the course sits at the high end.
The rest of this article explains where that comes from and how to adjust it.
Why "correct three times on different days"
Two findings do most of the work here.
Retrieval beats restudying. Across many studies, taking a practice test produces better long-term retention than spending the same time rereading. Dunlosky and colleagues' 2013 review rated practice testing as one of the two most useful techniques they examined, and Adesope, Trevisan and Sundararajan's 2017 meta-analysis found practice testing reliably outperformed restudying, across formats including multiple choice. We covered the basics in our active recall guide.
Spreading retrieval out beats cramming it. Rawson and Dunlosky (2011, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General) studied how much retrieval practice students need. Their finding was that getting an item right several times in one session hits diminishing returns quickly, while relearning it in later sessions keeps paying off. Their practical recommendation was roughly: get each item right about three times in the first session, then relearn it in about three later sessions.
Put simply: ten correct answers in one evening are worth less than three correct answers spread across three days.
How to count "one topic"
The number that matters is not questions per exam but questions per idea. Before planning, list the topics on the exam, then ask how many distinct ideas each contains. A "distinct idea" is something that could be a whole exam question on its own: a mechanism, a definition with consequences, a type of calculation.
A rough guide:
- A 50-minute lecture usually contains 8 to 15 distinct ideas.
- A textbook chapter usually contains 15 to 30.
- A problem type in maths or physics counts as one idea, but you need several varied examples of it, not one.
If a topic has 12 ideas and you want each answered correctly three times, you need at least 36 correct answers. Since you will get some wrong, plan for around 45 to 50 questions on that topic across the week.
A worked example: one topic, one quiz
To make that concrete, here is a single 10-question quiz on one data-structures topic, hash tables, generated from about 280 words of notes with our text to quiz generator at medium difficulty. These questions were generated by the tool and are shown without edits.
What is the effect of a high load factor (alpha) on hash table performance?
- A) It improves average-case lookup time
- B) It leads to faster insertion times
- C) It degrades performance as alpha grows (correct)
- D) It guarantees O(1) operations
When should a hash table be resized according to the source text?
- A) When the load factor exceeds 0.5
- B) When the number of entries equals the number of buckets
- C) When the load factor exceeds a threshold like 0.75 (correct)
- D) When a collision occurs
What is the main difference between separate chaining and open addressing?
- A) Separate chaining uses linked lists, while open addressing uses arrays (correct)
- B) Open addressing allows for more keys than buckets
- C) Separate chaining requires tombstone markers
- D) Open addressing is faster in all cases
Tool's explanation: "The main difference is that separate chaining uses linked lists to handle collisions at each bucket, while open addressing stores all entries directly in the array itself."
The third question has good distractors: tombstones belong to open addressing, not chaining, and "open addressing allows more keys than buckets" gets the load factor rule backwards. Students who have blurred the two schemes will fall for them. The key is slightly loose, since chaining also uses an array of buckets, which is the kind of wording worth checking against your notes when you review.
What the quiz shows about counting: ten questions covered about eight distinct ideas from this one topic (hash functions, collisions, chaining, probing, clustering, load factor, resizing, when to use a tree instead). One quiz touches each idea roughly once. To reach "right three times on three days," you need about three passes at this topic, and the later passes should not be the identical quiz.
It also shows a limit. At medium difficulty most questions were recall-level ("what is," "what happens"). None asked you to calculate a load factor or to reason through a specific scenario, such as what happens when keys are inserted into a nearly full table that uses linear probing. For the second and third passes, switch to hard difficulty or write a few application questions yourself.
Spacing the quizzes
For a test about a week away, the research on spacing (for example Cepeda and colleagues' 2008 study in Psychological Science) suggests gaps of about a day between sessions on the same material work well. The ideal gap grows as the exam gets further away, so for a final that is a month out, a few days between passes is better.
A simple rule that works for most people:
- First pass as soon as the topic is learned or reviewed.
- Second pass one to two days later.
- Third pass two to three days after that.
- Final pass one or two days before the exam, not the morning of.
Mixing topics
In the first pass, quiz one topic at a time. That is how you find the gaps. By the second or third pass, start mixing questions from different topics in a single quiz.
Mixed quizzes feel harder and your scores will drop. That is expected. On the real exam, questions do not come labelled by topic; part of the skill is recognising which idea a question is about. Practising only in blocks hides that skill. The evidence for this, mostly from maths and category learning, is summarised in our interleaving practice guide.
A practical way to mix: generate one quiz per topic, then for your later passes take a few questions from each and shuffle them, or paste short excerpts from two or three topics into one generation.
What to do with wrong answers
Wrong answers are the most valuable output of the whole process. Treat them like this:
- Log every miss, including lucky guesses, in one place: the question, the correct answer, and one line on why you missed it (confused two ideas, did not know it, misread the question).
- Go back to the source for each one. Do not just read the correct option; find the sentence in your notes that explains it. If the key looks wrong, check it: generated questions are occasionally miskeyed.
- Re-attempt misses the next day before any new questions, with the answer covered.
- A miss is cleared only after you have got it right on two separate days.
If most of your misses come from one topic, move that topic up the schedule and give it an extra pass. If most come from misreading questions, slow down; that is an exam-technique problem, not a knowledge problem.
A sample 7-day schedule
This example assumes an exam on four topics (A, B, C, D) and about 60 to 90 minutes a day. Each quiz is 10 to 20 questions.
Day 1. Topic A quiz and topic B quiz (first pass). Log misses. Fix notes for anything you got wrong.
Day 2. Topic C quiz and topic D quiz (first pass). Re-attempt yesterday's misses first.
Day 3. Second pass on A and B, with new or regenerated questions at a harder level. Re-attempt misses from Day 2.
Day 4. Second pass on C and D. Re-attempt misses from Day 3.
Day 5. First mixed quiz: questions from all four topics, shuffled, about 20 to 30 questions. Expect a lower score than on single-topic quizzes.
Day 6. Error log only: every unresolved miss from the week. Then a short mixed quiz of 15 to 20 questions on the weakest two topics.
Day 7 (the day before). One short mixed quiz across all topics, a read-through of the error log, and an early night. No new material.
That adds up to roughly 150 to 200 questions across four topics, about 40 to 50 per topic, in line with the "30 to 60 per topic" range above. If you are working from long material such as textbook chapters or slide decks, see our guides on quizzing yourself from a textbook chapter and making a practice test from lecture slides. To lay out a longer plan across several subjects, the free study plan tool builds a day-by-day schedule from your exam date.
When you have less than a week
Compress rather than cut. With three days, do first passes on Day 1, a mixed pass on Day 2 and the error log plus a short mixed quiz on Day 3. With one day, see our 24-hour cram guide. The principle does not change: short quizzes, spaced as far apart as you can manage, with wrong answers revisited.
The takeaway
There is no universal number, but there is a reliable target: every important idea answered correctly at least three times, on three different days. For most topics that means 30 to 60 questions spread across a week in short quizzes, moving from single-topic to mixed, and getting harder as you go. The quizzes you get wrong matter more than the ones you get right, so keep an error log and clear each miss on two separate days.
If generating that many questions sounds like the hard part, paste each topic's notes, or attach photos, PDFs or slides, into the free Notiq quiz generator and spend your time answering instead of writing.
Frequently asked questions
Is it better to do more practice questions or review notes?
For most exams, practice questions. Research consistently finds that retrieval practice produces better long-term retention than rereading. Review your notes in a targeted way, only for the ideas behind the questions you got wrong.
Should I repeat the same practice questions?
Repeat the ideas, not necessarily the exact questions. Re-attempting a missed question the next day is useful, but taking an identical quiz many times lets you memorise answer positions. Regenerate or reword questions for later passes.
How many practice questions should I do per day?
Around 20 to 40 is manageable for most students alongside other study, split into short quizzes of 10 to 20. Quality of review matters more than volume: each wrong answer should get a few minutes of checking against your notes.
When should I stop doing practice questions before an exam?
Do your last short mixed quiz the day before, then stop. The morning of the exam is too late for new learning to consolidate; a quick look at your error log is enough.
