How to read a map
It has been my experience that a lot of students approaching a pre-test do not know how to read a map and many instructors cannot teach it correctly.
I found that students were able to navigate much more effectively when given a tool to actually measure distance rather than wildly guess. I taught my students that when judging your distance to a feature on the map, you should find two remote features about the same distance apart as the original feature is from you (or at an easy ratio like double or half the distance).
With that, then you can measure the distance between the two remote features with a ruler on the map and gain an appreciation of your distance to the original feature.... it takes about 10 seconds