I struggle with time-management in exams, how should I deal with this?

In GCSE history, one of the things they are testing you on is your ability to communicate your knowledge and thoughts under time pressure. With the right approach and enough planning ahead, it easy to get down what you need to and have time to spare. A top tip is to practice, practice, practice, so you really get a feel for how long each question will take you.

The paper is structured and the marks allocated to give you some guidance on how long you need to spend on each question. At GCSE the examiners will usually split the paper up into different sections and give you a rough guideline of how long you should spend on each section. It is highly advisable to stick to this. As a rough guide, if a question has 7 marks you should spend approximately 7 minutes on it. So for the short 1 mark questions, you should spend one minute answering the question quickly and move on, so that you can maximise the time you have on longer questions where more thinking is required. The exam paper is built for you to do this, they really are trying to be helpful and this should also lead to you having 5 to 10 minutes to briefly check over your work at the end. This extra time is also a nice safety net to have should you begin to run over on any question.

Remember, if you do begin to fall behind your time schedule DO NOT PANIC, just finish the sentence you are on and move onto the next question. This way your marks will only be affected for this single question and the rest of your paper will still be at your usual standard.