“There was not enough time, so I couldn’t finish the paper!”

“It was a lengthy paper, thus I had to leave a few questions at the end!”

“There were only five minutes left when I got to that answer.”

How often have you heard these statements from a tearful child who returns from the exam hall, repenting that she could have done better if only she had managed her time well?

Your child may have prepared well for the exam; perhaps, even revised the material a hundred times. But, if she was unable to answer the questions only because she couldn’t manage time when it mattered most, she is sure to come back feeling dejected. All her hard work would go down the drain. And, if this happens to be the story every time, then what she needs is a lesson in some time management skills to go with her studies.

Although most children prepare well for exams, many have no knowledge of exam writing techniques. As a result, they often turn up for an exam without sufficient practice of how to answer the questions within a given timeframe. One way of dealing with this is to make your child practice test-taking with a timer or a stopwatch at home before she actually appears for the exam. As Oxford Royale Academy advices in an article: “Do a past paper a few days before and time it really strictly – work out a way to write quickly and neatly so that you don’t waste your first exam cracking this.”

While writing an exam, uneven distribution of time between questions is a critical mistake children make. Making your child practice test-taking will allow you to identify the areas in which she ends up wasting time the most - it could be in ideation for essay-writing or spending too much time on one particular answer, not knowing how much to write and when to stop. The idea behind test-taking is to make her understand how to distribute time between questions based on their difficulty levels and then tune the brain to stick to the time limits set.

With some useful time-management strategies and practice, your children can overcome all these problems.

For many such useful time management tips to be kept in mind in the exam hall, check out our ClipBook.