Time to take charge
Blog 1 - Time to take charge
1 How long should any exam take
2 Whats the worst mistake you can make in any exam
The answers to these two questions shock students every time. The answer to number one is, however long you have been given. Exams are written and designed to take the full length of the time allowed for you. It never ceases to amaze me how often students claim there is a mistake in an exam so maybe the starting point in this discussion should be to lift the lid on the exam writing process.
I write exams for final year accounting modules. If the exam is being sat in May, then I need to have this exam written in first draft in October of the previous year. I must then prepare detailed answers for each question. At this point the exam is then sent to an internal colleague for review. They proof read the questions in order to make sure the requirements are clear and understandable. They also check all the answers to make sure they are accurate.
We the send the documents off to our External Examiner, this is an expert at another university who also checks the paper and answers before sign off. After this the university examinations department ensure that they are finally types up and formatted correctly. At this point they come back to me for a final check.
So when a student puts their hand up in the exam to say they have spotted a mistake, chances are, the mistake is theirs, not all of ours. But anyway I digress from our original questions.
The answer to number two is not spending enough time on each question. If you find your self in the position of getting to the end of an exam and you haven't even started the final question, this is a problem. If you have a four question paper with equal marks (25) for each question, and you don't get to question four then you have already put 25 of the marks in the bin. To be able to score an A on this exam you then need to get 95% marks on each of the questions you have done. This is highly unlikely.
You should only be spending as long on each question as the marks allow, and there is a very simple way of finding this out.
If you have a three hour exam then this is 180 minutes. If you exam is out of 100 marks then 180/100 = 1.8 minutes per mark. More realistically I say to student to take 10 minutes off at the start to read and the same at the end. This means 160 minutes, so 1.6 minutes per mark. Then you look at the number of marks for each question and multiply this by 1.6. This is how long you should spend on each question.
This means that if you are doing a 20 mark question you should spend 32 minutes on the question (20 x 1.6). Regardless of where you are in a question when you each the end of the allotted time, move on!!!!!! If you spend longer than the allotted time on a question then you are stealing time from another question, which means you may not have enough time to spend on the other question.
One technique I have found very useful is to take my watch off, and I mean an actual watch that goes tick tock, your phone will not be allowed to be with you in the exam, and place it on the top right corner of the exam timetable, during my first ten minutes reading time I will decide on which questions I am going to do, and calculate the amount of minutes I can spend on each question. I will then write this number in big bold letters on the top of the exam paper next to the question number.
During the exam when I start a question I write on the paper next to the number of the minutes the time I started the question, and also the time that I will finish the question. If I finish a question before the allotted number of minutes I will see how early I finished and write this as a + number on the paper. So if I am doing a 20 mark question I know I have 32 minutes. If I start this question at 10.34am, I know that I have until 11.06am. If I finish the question at 10.59am then I am 7 minutes in front. I would write +7 on the paper next to the question times. I consider that I have 'banked' 7 minutes. By the same token if I get to 11.06am and haven't finished, tough, move on.
Once I have been through the entire paper and given every question either the time it is allowed, or I have completed, I can then surmise whether I am in front on the paper. I then have all of the 'banked' minutes to go back to any questions that I didn't finish. For example if I finish questions one two and four and have banked 12 minutes, but didn't finish question three, then I can go back and spend the banked 12 minutes on finishing question three. In my experience this is the most efficient way to approach exams at it ensures that you spend the correct amount of time targeting the marks in each question first before trying to get the extra few marks at the end of a question.
If you have 5 minutes to spend, you will pick up many more marks on spending this 5 minutes on a new question, than you would spending an extra 5 minutes ensuring that you have finished a question.
So, wear a watch, manage your time, don't put any marks in the bin and enjoy the increase in your exam grades.
