As your prepare to pass your EPPP test through the TSM study process, you will take roughly 4000 questions throughout the course of your studies. There’s a reason we make sure you answer this many questions before ever taking your EPPP test and it has to do with what I’ve been sharing about the brain.
Tests are normally associated with stress and anxiety. The very thought of taking a test is often enough to evoke negative memories from your school days, or to invoke stressful memories from your more recent time in graduate school.
In neurological terms, we might say that the idea of test-taking fires up the anxiety feeling in the cingulate gyrus, located deep inside the brain’s cortex. When the former fires up, the later fires up: test-taking and anxiety have become “wired” together in the brain.
If that has been your experience, it doesn’t have to continue to be that way. Even when certain associations get hardwired into the brain, they can be reversed because of the brain’s remarkable plasticity. Thus, by simulating the conditions of a test within the safe and relaxed environment of the TSM study process, the experience you have previously associated with stress and anxiety becomes paired with relaxation. In a sense, we provide you with 4,000 “conditioning moments” for you to practice desensitizing yourself.
Since neurons that fire apart, wire apart, after you have answered 4,000 questions without anxiety, your mind and emotions have been prepared to take the EPPP test without anxiety. By the end of your study process you will have worked to master this desensitization process, so when you sit for your EPPP test, you’ll have the ability to replicate this relaxed state throughout the exam.
This is not the only reason we give you so many test questions. Frequent testing also improves memory, and thus reinforces the information you need to successfully pass your EPPP test.