How Many OC Practice Questions Should a Child Do Each Week? | Blog

One of the most common questions parents ask once OC preparation starts is a simple one:

How many questions should my child be doing each week?

It’s an understandable question. Practice feels measurable. More questions can feel like more progress. But when it comes to the OC test, that way of thinking often leads families in the wrong direction.

Why “more questions” isn’t always better

It’s easy to assume improvement comes from doing as many questions as possible.

In practice, that often creates a few problems:

Children get tired and start rushing
Mistakes creep in, even on familiar content
Practice becomes something to get through, not learn from
Confidence can drop instead of improve

When that happens, doing more questions doesn’t help. It just adds pressure.

What the OC test is actually asking of students

The OC test isn’t measuring how many questions a child has seen before.

It’s testing whether they can:

Work steadily under time pressure
Read and think efficiently on a screen
Decide when to move on
Stay focused across a full session

Those skills don’t improve just by increasing volume. They improve when practice feels like the test itself.

So how many questions is “enough”?

There isn’t a single number that works for every child.

What matters much more than the total count is:

Whether practice is timed
Whether it’s done online
Whether mistakes are reviewed properly
Whether the questions target the right areas

For most children, a smaller number of well-chosen questions, done under realistic conditions, leads to far better results than large volumes of untimed work.

What effective weekly practice usually looks like

For many families, strong OC preparation ends up looking quite simple.

A typical week might include:

One or two short, timed online practice sessions
A clear focus on specific skills or question types
Time spent reviewing mistakes and explanations
Adjustments the following week based on what didn’t go well

This kind of structure keeps practice manageable. It also makes progress easier to see.

Why review and explanations matter so much

It’s tempting to move straight on to the next set of questions.

But the biggest improvements usually come from slowing down and asking:

Where did time get lost?
Which questions caused hesitation?
Were mistakes due to misunderstanding, or rushing?

Without clear explanations, those questions are hard to answer.

That’s why detailed, question-by-question explanations matter. They turn mistakes into something useful, rather than something to forget and move past.

Why we built OC Test Prep this way

This is exactly why OC Test Prep focuses on short, targeted sessions and customised weekly plans.

Rather than encouraging children to do more and more questions, the platform is designed to:

Recommend practice based on recent performance
Keep sessions short enough to stay focused
Build review directly into the process
Provide clear explanations for every question

Weekly plans aren’t about filling time. They’re about helping families focus on the practice that actually makes a difference.

A common trap parents fall into

Many parents worry that if their child isn’t doing “enough”, they’ll fall behind.

In reality, the opposite is often true.

Children who practise regularly under realistic conditions tend to:

Feel calmer during tests
Manage their time better
Make fewer careless errors
Recover more easily when questions get difficult

They haven’t done more questions. They’ve just done the right kind of practice.

Final thought

If you’re trying to work out how many questions your child should be doing each week, it’s usually a sign you’re asking the wrong thing.

A better question is whether their practice is short enough to stay focused, realistic enough to feel like the test, and reviewed closely enough to actually change what happens next time.

When those pieces are in place, the number of questions tends to take care of itself.

If you want help putting that kind of structure in place, OC Test Prep offers customised weekly plans and a one-week free trial, so you can see how this approach works for your child before committing.