How to Improve Your Time Management in Exams

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By Zayna Dar, Founder, Shuhari Tuition

Ask any student what the hardest part of sitting an exam is and there’s a good chance they’ll mention time management. There never seems to be enough of it. Without good time management, even the most hardworking students can struggle to showcase what they really know. Even if you’ve revised thoroughly, running out of time can leave you walking out of the exam hall thinking, ‘If only I’d had another ten minutes.’

Exams come with the challenge of working against the clock. The timer doesn’t slow down because you’ve reached a difficult question, and it certainly won’t pause while you try to figure out the best way to answer it. Every minute counts, which is why learning how to manage your time gives you the best chance of picking up as many marks as possible.

Time management is something that improves with practice. The more comfortable you become with working under timed conditions, the easier it is to judge your pace and know when it’s time to move on. In this guide, we’ll look at some of the most common reasons students struggle with time management in exams and share some practical techniques that will help you make the most of the time you have in the exam hall.

Common time management mistakes in exams

Before we consider how to manage your time better, it’s worth looking at where things tend to go wrong in the first place. You might know the material well enough, but what actually costs you marks is how you’ve mismanaged your time. Here are some of the mistakes we see time and time again and how to avoid them:

1. Not pacing yourself across the whole paper

A common issue students have with time management is spending longer on one question that you intended. Time has a way of slipping past unnoticed once you’re focused on writing, and you may not realise it until it’s too late. Perhaps you feel like you’ve only just started when in reality you’re already a third of the way through the exam with barely a third of the paper completed. Without regularly checking the clock, you run the risk of losing track of how much time has actually passed.

A useful habit is to work out roughly what time you should be at by certain points in the paper. This is easiest when you divide up your time based on how many marks each question is worth. For example, if you have 90 minutes for a paper worth 60 marks, that works out to approximately 1.5 minutes per mark, so a 6-mark question should take around 9 minutes, while a 20-mark question should take closer to half an hour. Checking the clock during your exam only takes a few seconds and it alerts you to the fact that you’re falling behind while there’s still time to speed up rather than after the damage is done.

2. Getting stuck on a question you don’t know

We’ve all been there. You turn the page, read a question, and your mind goes blank. Your instinct might be to sit there and keep trying, rereading the question in the hope that something clicks. But every minute spent staring at a question you can’t answer is a minute taken away from questions you can. The longer you sit with it, the more the pressure builds, which can make it even harder to think clearly.

A better approach is to leave the question and come back to it once you’ve worked through the rest of the paper. Mark it clearly so you don’t forget to return to it, then move on to something you can make headway in. What you’ll find is that answering other questions jogs your memory in a way that sitting and staring at the question never will, and it’s common to find the question more manageable the second time round. Coming back to it later also means that if you run out of time in the end, it’s the one question you couldn’t answer straight away that remains unfinished rather than several questions you would have known the answer to.

3. Skipping the planning stage to save time

When the clock is ticking, you might decide that planning is something you can’t afford to spend time on. The logic makes sense: every minute spent planning is a minute not spent writing, so surely it’s better to get straight into your answer. However, diving into a longer question without a plan often costs more time than it saves.

For example, you might end up going off track, repeating points you’ve already made, or realising halfway through that you've missed what the question was actually asking, which usually means crossing out work and starting again. Without a clear plan, there’s a higher chance your response will be disorganised and you experience writer’s block midway through.

Planning is most important for extended responses, such as essay questions in history or English, where you’re expected to build an argument over several paragraphs. Without a plan, you’re more likely to produce an essay that reads like a list of things you know about the topic without any real structure holding it together. Examiners are looking for a clear line of reasoning that runs from your introduction through to your conclusion, and that’s difficult to achieve if you’re deciding your structure as you go.

It’s worth spending a few minutes jotting down a quick plan before you start answering any essay-style questions. It doesn’t to be detailed. Noting your main argument, the key points you’ll use to support it, and the order you’ll cover them in is enough to keep you on track. Planning beforehand usually improves the quality of your answer as opposed to cobbling an answer together as you go. A few minutes spent planning at the start often saves more time than it costs, and it results in a stronger response.

4. Not checking how many marks a question is worth

Every question on an exam paper carries a mark allocation, and that mark is an indicator as to how much you should be writing. A question worth two marks is asking for a short answer, typically two points or one point with a brief explanation, while a 12-mark question is asking you to develop a detailed response that weighs different viewpoints and concludes with a supported judgement. Overlooking this and treating every question the same, regardless of what it’s worth, can lead to you