Managing your time in an exam is a skill itself.

 Let’s face the bitter truth. Exams are quite boring for many and even dreadful for some. All of us have faced several exams in our lives, the only difference is their type. But being organized surely takes off so much pressure.

 Time management: a crucial entity of exams

The only difference between your day-to-day practice and exams is time. Time is something that contributes to the additional pressure during exam time. So, it should be well managed and this is the purpose behind this blog. Today, in this blog, we will discuss how to manage our time effectively during exam hours.

The following points must be kept in mind to manage your time effectively

• Making proper use of reading time: Usually, for any paper, the allocated reading time ranges between 10-15 minutes or in some cases even more. You must not simply skip this time slot by looking towards others instead, you must take full advantage of this slot. As soon as you get your question paper, you must go through it with full concentration. After a thorough reading, you shall proceed with the following steps. They are:

1. Plan the order of your answers i.e. whether you will be solving Section- A first or Section-C first.
2. Instead of freaking out from the question, you don’t know, just mentally prepare yourself to leave it for that particular moment and come back later. This is because if you waste excess time thinking about the question you don’t know, you will not be able to solve those questions which you know.
3. Suppose you are having a choice between two questions and you need to solve them, make the decision during reading time to avoid wastage of time later.
4. Instructions and rules present on the question paper must be read well in advance because if you violate any rule or commit a mistake during an exam, you won’t get proper time to fix it. Moreover, this same goes for the complicated questions as well.

• Solve first that you know first: One must not waste his/her time by staring at those questions which he/she can’t recall at that moment because it’s not good to lose marks because of a single problem. Such questions are quite tricky and can be of any type like MCQ’s, Subjective, FIB etc. Instead, that question should be marked properly so that it can be solved/tried further and the focus should be shifted to other questions.

• Practice makes everyone perfect: Before exams, try to practice concepts as much as you can. This will save a lot of time in the exam as after practice, you don’t need to devote extra time for any question and your paper will complete in due time without any questions left. You can’t go for best results/best work without proper practice 

• No last moment studies: Most of the students prefer last moment studies but this is not a good practice. Last moment studies/revision before exam leads to certain confusions which are not at all good for your tests. These confusions will waste a lot of time as you will be in a dilemma whether your approach towards solutions is correct or not, or whether the steps told by your friends during the last moment revision are correct or not, etc.

• Previous year papers: After you complete your entire course, you must go for the previous year question papers of that particular subject. As in the exam, most of the questions that you’ll face will be an exact copy or of the same pattern as that of the previous year.

• Time must be divided: Yes, you read it right! Before you enter the examination hall, you must have a rough idea of how much time you should devote to every section present in the question paper. For example, You are having 3 sections namely Section A, Section B and Section C in a paper. Section A constitutes short questions like MCQ, FIB or one-word answers. Section B comprises numerical and Section C is made up of long answer questions that require at least 150-200 words per question.

So, according to the paper stated above, what should be the ideal choice if a paper is of 2 hours? It would be: Maximum time for section B and Section C and one should start from Section C as it carries topmost marks instead of going for section A initially. To conclude, an ideal choice for this paper is: 

1. 50 minutes for section C
2. 40 minutes for section B
3. 20 minutes for section A
4. The last 10 minutes should always be kept reserved for revision of the entire solution book

Key Takeaways

Time management is required to release your excess exam pressure, to avoid silly mistakes etc. This skill is not mentioned in any book, so one must go through the above-mentioned points to score genuinely well in exams.

Also published on Medium.