How Do I Manage My Time In The Exam Hall?

I was browsing through my mail box yesterday and I came across a great question which is : ‘How Do I Manage My Time In The Exam Hall?’

Apparently, the question was from an aspirant who probably read through the Uniuyo Post UTME 2016: What Every Candidate Must Know and realized that 100 questions are normally given to prospective student within the time-frame of sixty minutes {Please ensure you read that article if you have not} . So, He/She recognize  the fact that it is going to be a war zone in the examination hall, from the ‘START’ to the ‘STOP’. The question is a million dollar question i.e very important and timely.

Unless you’re a mad adrenaline addict, you probably won’t enjoy exams. That’s a fact. The most successful students might get in a pickle about exams, just like the rest of us; they might dread them for weeks, and have days where they feel like doing anything but revision – but often, they see the task in a more practical light. Exams are fundamentally a test of your ability to make the most of the time available to show off as much as possible, and collect all the points you can. The key to succeeding in an exam, is of course to know your stuff beforehand – but it’s just as much about working efficiently and in an organized way; staying cool and calm to avoid silly mistakes; having a system that makes you feel confident and stops you from panicking. Here, we’ve gathered some tips for doing just that.

Before the exam

Know what you’re up against before you go in

At school, I often felt like the examiners must think we were all incredibly dumb, so often did they repeat phrases like ‘THREE QUESTIONS. You must answer THREE QUESTIONS. ONLY THREE! BUT NO LESS THAN THREE. Have you all got that?!’ Er… yeah! We’ve been going through past papers for three whole months. I think we all know by now how many questions we’ve got to answer… But I was wrong. In his History exam, a boy in my class who seemed to get the highest marks at everything he did only answered two questions. Having stressed himself out completely, and stayed up late revising the night before, he’d misread the front of the paper, and against all common sense thought the format must have changed. Now, this was clearly the direct result of nerves, and a desire to start writing quickly in order to make the most of the time available – but because of this mistake, he missed out on the grade he deserved and wanted. And someone will do this in almost every paper – I’ve done it twice, and most people I know have done something like it at least once. It seems silly, but the way to avoid it is to make sure you know exactly what you’ve got to do before you go into the exam room – it’s very unlikely that the format will change without you being told, so alarm bells should ring if the paper doesn’t look like what you expected. If you were expecting three questions and it looks like you’ve only got to do two, take a deep breath, read the instructions again – maybe even check with the invigilator – and don’t leap in without being absolutely sure of what to do.

You can’t get the format for an exam without a past question

Practice answering past questions quickly

If you don’t do practice papers before an exam, you might be surprised at how difficult it is to answer quickly . haphazard  or untidy work is a very good way to annoy the person marking your paper before they’ve even started; but equally, you don’t want to undersell yourself by not finishing your answer. Do a past question test a few days before and time it really strictly – work out a way to answer quickly and neatly so that you don’t waste your first exam cracking this.

In the exam: keeping on top of things

First: read every question carefully

In most exams these days, you’ll have to pick an answer out of multiple options. Before you leap in, take a deep breath and read every question carefully. Don’t skim-read, and don’t dismiss an option before thinking about it for at least a few seconds. Examiners have a nasty habit of dressing simple questions up in bewildering language: don’t miss a gem because it’s been confusingly-worded. Similarly, once see a question: MAKE SURE YOU READ IT PROPERLY. A bit like doing too many or too few questions, misreading a question (especially a long answer one) can result in you missing out on marks that you deserve to get. No matter how brilliant, inspired, or interesting an answer is, if it answers the wrong question, it’ll probably be a disaster. Make sure you avoid a nightmare by reading everything carefully.

[Read: Multiple Choice Exam Strategies And Tips]

Divide your time up

Before an exam, when you’re double- and triple-checking how many and what sort of questions you’ve got to do, make a plan of how long you’re going to spend on each thing – and then make sure you stick to it. Students who do well in exams always know how they’re going to approach an exam, and how to portion out their time so that they don’t run out.

When you’re planning how to spend your time, make sure you assign some time at the beginning for planning, and at the end to check and finish things off.For instance, You have an hour to tackle 100 questions, It means you have approximately 16 seconds to answer each question. Before the exam, try a few different ways of answering and find out what works best.

Crucially, whatever your plan is, you must stick to it religiously. If you know you’ve got sixteen seconds each for a question, DO NOT, whatever you do, let yourself spend twenty seconds. It’s always incredibly tempting to give yourself just another few seconds to try and squeeze one last guess to the answer, but have the discipline to resist, because a rushed final answer will probably do more damage than an excellent first one can make up for. If you’re really tempted to spend a little more time than you’re allowed on a question, leave a blank page after your answer, and determine to come back to it at the end if you can.

Start with something you can really do

Some people like to launch straight into English language, most will choose the most difficult section : to get a question they’ve been dreading out of the way, knocked on the head, leaving lots of time at the end to do everything else at a more leisurely pace. I like to start strong: with a favourite subject, or a question I know I can nail – doing something like that early, I find, makes me feel confident – I can do this. I also tend to leave the questions I’m dreading most until the end, and allot a little more time to attempt them: getting everything else out of the way so that I can concentrate on my nightmare subject or question. This is very subjective, though: again, it’s all about experimenting before the exam to find a method that suits you best.

And if disaster strikes…

If you go totally blank and find you can’t answer something, realise you’ve answered the wrong options, or discover you’ve misread the question, do not panic. Read this to tackle that: How To Beat Exam Anxiety

Don’t leave early

The temptation to leave an exam early can be almost irresistible: freedom, and an escape from the palpable tension of the exam hall. But whatever you do, resist. Sit and re-read what you’ve written; double-check all of your answers;’ cross your ts and dot your I’s’ Twenty minutes hanging about outside the exam room, waiting for your friends to finish is fairly inconsequential or worthless, but you can guarantee that if you leave early, you’ll immediately realise you’ve missed something important or done something catastrophically wrong. Your sixty minutes are precious! You’ll never get it back, but you will have endless time to waste after you’re done.

{Read: What You Must Know About Exams As Students}

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