With board exams at hand, one issue that troubles students across the spectrum is time management. Students, despite preparing for the exam, can face the heat if they do not manage their time carefully. The duration for most theory papers is three hours and students need to strategize carefully to finish their paper with few minutes to spare for revision of their answer script.
While every student has their own method to attempt an examination, there are certain tips that work for everyone. Here we bring to you some expert backed tips that will help you manage your time during the exam.
1. Practice Papers: Solve practice papers in exam environment, i.e. set a stopwatch for three or two hours, before the exam. Solving practice papers is not just for understanding the exam pattern but to get you accustomed to solving 25-40 questions at a stretch without any significant break.
2. Skim through the question paper: Almost all education boards now give an additional 15 minutes time before the commencement of the exam for students to read the question paper. Utilize this time. Read the question paper thoroughly and identify the questions as per their difficulty-level - easy, medium, and hard.
3. Answer the easy questions first: While teachers recommend that students should try to attempt questions in serial order, it is not mandatory. Identify easy questions or topics which you know inside out and attempt those questions first. These will not only take lesser time but also boost your confidence.
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4. Time Allocation: It is important to know how much time to allocate to a question. One way is to divide the duration of the exam with the marks allotted. If you have 3 hours (180 minutes) for 100 marks, it means you can spend about one and a half minutes on every mark. This means you can allot about nine minutes to a 6 mark question. Another way to allocate time is to see the high mark questions and see how much time you will need to solve these questions. After you have sorted the time required to answer long questions, you can allocate time for the short-answer type questions.
5. Keep An eye on the clock: It is important that you are aware of how much time has passed since you started writing the exam. If permitted, carry a wrist watch and check the time at regular intervals.
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Bonus tip: For long-answer type questions, specially essay-writing or letter-writing questions, students need to adhere to word limit. Students often end up writing more than they should and end up spending more time on one question than they should. The time allowed before the exam commences should be used to plan long-answer type questions so that these do not eat up a student's time during the exam.
