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BEFORE WRITING YOUR EXAM
FILL IN YOUR BASIC STUDENT INFORMATION
It is best to fill in your student information on your exam paper before the exam begins. You do not want to waste time doing this during precious exam time.
TAKE NOTE OF THE INSTRUCTIONS
For some of your exams you will be given time to read through your question paper (roughly 15 minutes) before the exam starts. Take careful note of the instructions section. In cases where you are not given special time to read through the paper, allocate about 10 minutes to do so as soon as the exam starts. It is a good idea to highlight or mark on the paper which questions you are going to answer and alert yourself to the questions that you feel you will be able to answer best.
USE YOUR TIME WISELY
It is extremely important to take note of the amount of time you have available to write your questions. Look at the total exam marks and divide this into the total exam time. This will give you the amount of time you can spend per mark. For example, if the exam counts 150 marks and you are given 3 hours (180 minutes) you can spend 1 minute and 12 seconds per mark. (180 divided by 150). This means that you can spend about 24 minutes on a 20-mark question. Give yourself some time to plan longer essay-type questions before you start writing. For example, for an essay question for which you have allocated 45 minutes, use about 10 minutes for planning and 35 minutes for writing.
TIP -
There may be a compulsory question made up of multiple choice sub-questions. Generally you should spend about one minute on each multiple choice question, but this depends on the mark allocation and on the subject.
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