Time Management is very important for your exams whether its a college placement test, school exam or a regular end of the year scheduled academic test. If you are properly prepared for the exam but are not good in time management, you may not have good scores. Bad management of the available time will make you lose out to your rival candidates. So its very important to properly plan how much time you are going to allot ot each question in the exam.
Planning the exposure to each question should be done very quickly. Normally a maximum of five minutes should be devoted at the beginning of the exam to study the questions in the question paper and deciding in your mind how much time you have to allot to each question. The questions of higher marks should get more time alloted while the small theoretical questions should have lesser time devoted to them. You should manage yourself in such a way that you dont spend more than a minute on any question than you decided previously. This would help you maximise your time utilization and prevent the depression arising out of concentrating more on one single tough question when you can do all the other ones easily.
The main purpose of time management is to maximise your output and prevent you from wasting your time and energy on one single tough problem in the exam. Keep in mind the total time of the exam, the number of questions asked, the type of questions and marks alloted to each question. Observe that these things for the initial five minutes and calculate how much time you should allot to each question. The time spent on each questions should not be more than the time alloted to the question by you plus one minute. You must stick to this rule whatever may happen.
When you are finished attempting all the questions you were confident of, you can again quickly see the number of questions pending and allot some time to each one. Then again atleast attempt those questions if there is no negative marking. In job placement test papers or campus recruitment exams, if you have negative marking then you should not attempt the questions you are not confident of. But if there is no negative marking in placement papers or college academic exams, you must attempt all questions whether they are multiple choice type or theoretical type. Its always better to write or tick mark something than leaving the question unattempted.
Thus polishing your time management skills is as important as your regular studies. You can practise in regular monthly tests or Pre-exams and apply the experiences in the final exams. This way you can have better scores and ‘output’ from your knowledge and outscore your ‘hard to beat’ competitors!