In addition to understanding the directions, you need to be able to write kanji

(mostly from their Japanese readings), know the stroke order for kanji (you
might be asked what number stroke a partially written kanji is up to), be able to
write the Japanese names for all 214 radicals in hiragana (and for example,
have the ability to distingush whether the radical is used with the meaning of
moon or flesh in a particular kanji), know whether a reading is on or kun, know if
it is a kokuji (made-in-Japan kanji), understand how kanji relate to one another
in compound words (synonyms, antonyms, does the first modify the second, or
is the first a verb and the second its related noun or one of the even more
obscure relationships that I never quite understood),

Oh right, the books I used: I mostly just used whatever I could find cheap at Book-Off,
or what the school I was teaching at had available, but my favorite is the
series. It arranges words from most likely to show up to least likely, so you can
optimize for the test. Kind of cheating, in that it's a shortcut and maybe not the best for
long-term learning, but it makes the test a lot less stressful when you've seen similar
questions before.