Notes and common pitfalls in music theory training and testing

If you divide mistakes into situations where you didn’t understand/apply the concept (concept errors) and situations where you accidentally miscalculated something but knew the concept (‘typo’ errors), then you can tackle each in a more targeted way. I have found trying to reduce typo errors to be the most ‘bang for your buck’ way of increasing music theory test scores, your mileage may vary.

Avoiding ‘typo’ errors:
• Check that you’re in the right clef - this is the culprit for the majority of ‘typo’ errors for me and my students
• Keep track of the steps in your process. If you’re finding a cadence and one of your steps is to find the figured bass for the chord, write that figured bass down. You can erase it later, and going back at the end of the test will be easier and more streamlined if you have all of your intermediate steps in front of you
• Figure out a secondary check for your work. If you build primary triads by chord type, a secondary check could be to build them again by key signature and see if your answers match
• Checking your work sucks and is tedious and I don’t know many people who like to do it - remind yourself that the test situation is the one time where you have to be super thorough. Maybe think about how to make checking work more interesting, like going through even-number questions and then odd-number questions, or going backwards through the test
• Allow some time between solving the problem and checking it. Like in writing, taking a breather might help surface more errors
• Experiment with some testing techniques like solving the problems you know well first, or going through as quickly as possible and then slowly checking each problem. It’s not a weird testing technique if it works for you (and doesn’t disturb the test-takers around you)

Learning tips for concept errors:
• Make your own “cheat sheet” of the methods you use to solve each type of problem. Include all of the steps, so you learn to think through it all and not skip any ‘probably unnecessary’ steps. It’ll also let you see if there are any flaws in your reasoning
• You can use the other questions on the test to help you solve the ones with which you’re having trouble. If you don’t remember whether “Dominant 7th on A” means the chord starts on A or on E, a different question that says “Dominant 7th in F Major” will help disambiguate that
• If you don’t have a lot of success with rote memorisation, don’t worry. Very few things in music theory have to be memorised - like math, the concepts build upon themselves. If you know the logical reasoning, you can usually figure out and re-build the concepts or specifics (see the modes concept explainer for how to figure out any mode with one mnemonic and the C Major scale)