Exam-Day Strategies for the TEAS and HESI A2

By exam day, the studying is done. What is left is execution — protecting the preparation you have already built. The students who underperform on the TEAS and HESI A2 usually know more than their score suggests; they lose points to pacing, misreading, and nerves rather than to gaps in knowledge. These strategies cost nothing and save those points.

Pace by the clock, not by feel

Know your time budget per question before you start, and check the clock at fixed points — a quarter, half, and three-quarters of the way through each section. "Feel" is unreliable under pressure; the clock is not. If a single question is sinking you, flag it, choose your best guess, and move on. A blank you never returned to scores the same as a wrong answer — but a question you sat on for four minutes quietly costs you the three questions at the end you never reached.

Read the question that is actually asked

Entrance-exam questions are written to reward careful reading. Watch for the words that flip a question — except, not, least, best, most likely. These are easy to skim past and they invert the correct answer entirely. On a "select all that apply" item, judge each option on its own merits, true or false, rather than hunting for a set number — there is no rule that says three of five must be correct.

It also helps to predict the answer before you look at the options. If you read the stem, form an answer in your head, and then find it among the choices, you are far less likely to be talked out of it by a well-written distractor.

Eliminate, then decide

When you are unsure, remove the options you know are wrong first. Cutting two of four turns a guess into a coin flip, and often the elimination itself surfaces the answer. Distractors on these exams are designed to look plausible — eliminating deliberately is how you cut through that design instead of being caught by it.

Manage the nerves

A degree of nerves is normal and even helpful — it sharpens focus. If it tips into panic, stop for ten seconds and breathe slowly; it genuinely resets your attention and costs you almost no time. Trust your first instinct: research on test-taking consistently shows that changing answers costs points more often than it saves them, unless you have found a concrete, specific reason to switch — a word you misread, a calculation you can see was wrong.

The night before, and the morning of

Stop studying early the night before, lay out everything you need — ID, confirmation, directions — and sleep. On the morning of, eat something, arrive early enough that you are not rushing, and give yourself a few quiet minutes before you start. Walking in rested and calm protects every hour you put in over the previous weeks. The exam is not the moment to learn anything new; it is the moment to show what you already know.