Exam Timer

Practice under conditions

Working through a past paper over an afternoon tells you whether you know the material. Sitting the same paper in one go, under the real time limit, tells you whether you can produce it under pressure — and those are different skills. Most people who feel prepared and then underperform have practised the first and not the second.

The timing is a substantial part of what an exam tests. Deciding how long to spend on a question, recognising when to abandon one and come back, keeping enough time for the last section: none of that can be rehearsed without a clock that will not wait for you.

How to run it

Set the timer to the paper’s real length — two hours by default here, adjustable from the presets — and treat it as binding. Everything you would not have in the exam goes elsewhere before you start.

• Phone in another room, not on silent on the desk
• No looking anything up, even briefly, even once
• Write the whole paper, including the parts you would normally skip
• Stop when the timer stops, mid-sentence if that is where you are
• Mark it afterwards, honestly, against the scheme

Sound during practice

There is a tension here worth naming. Background noise helps you concentrate in a noisy room, but the exam hall will be quiet, and practising in a soundscape you will not have on the day is not ideal preparation.

The reasonable compromise: use audio when the room would otherwise make the practice impossible, and keep it to something with no events in it — pink noise or brown noise rather than rain or birdsong. If your room is quiet enough, sit it in silence. That is the condition you are training for.