Managing Time in Exams


Hello again everyone, and welcome back to my exams month, and the week of advice on what to do during exams themselves.

Today, I am going to be giving you some advice on the best ways to manage your time in an exam. There is nothing worse than running out of time in an exam, and panicking that you’re either not going to finish, or that you won’t have enough time to write everything you need to. I am usually a slow writer, so I’ve always had a problem of not being able to write everything in the time I have. Because of this, I have developed a few different techniques which I am going to share with you right now.

·         Read all of the questions before writing anything. This gives you sufficient foresight of what is to come and can help you to plan out what time you have in relation to the number of questions you have to answer.

·         Do the questions worth the most points FIRST! Most exams will allow you to do the questions in any order you wish, so long as they are numbered correctly. This was a useful technique for me at GCSE and A Levels and it meant that even if I didn’t manage to answer every question, I was able to do those which were worth the most and get maximum points in spite of not being able to finish.

·         Most teachers and professors will advise you to leave enough time to check through your answers at the end. Well, I am here to tell you that that is a poor piece of advice, and you should ONLY do it if you have answered all of the questions with time to spare. Otherwise, don’t panic yourself about it. If you aren’t going to have enough time to finish, then the idea of checking your paper at the end is a waste of time, which could be used to answer another question and get yourself more points.

·         Practice time management during revision. When doing past or mock papers, you have a perfect opportunity to see how much time you’re going to have and how long each question might take. It can give you an idea in advance of whether or not you need to speed up, spend more time on certain types of question, as well as how to improve your answers to raise your marks. This can relieve some of the panic, and make sure that the speed of the exam doesn’t catch you unawares when it comes to the day of the test.  Preparation is key!

There you are, those are the techniques I use when it comes to managing time in an exam scenario. If you want to share your own ideas on this subject or give your thoughts on anything I’ve said here, you can do so by commenting or by messaging me on my social media links below.

I am continuing to post every day throughout May, which means another post is coming tomorrow, so keep an eye out for that. And until then, all that’s left to say is to keep active, keep smiling, and above all else, keep believing!

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