In today’s post, we discuss what you should do with the time left after your exam, but before you submit your answers. Naturally, most people are anxious to get their score. However, your extra time could be better spent. Below is our take on the subject.
Time Left After Your Exam? Review What You Know
Our advice on what to do with the time left after your exam is typically counter intuitive. What most people tend to do is to go back over questions that left them confused. Whether it’s a question where they had familiarity, but not confidence. Or, whether it’s a question where they were unsure between two answers. Either scenario leaves a student racking their brain for potential answers…often coming up empty handed.
Our experience with thousands of students over the years, indicates that if the answer does not surface to mind within 30 seconds to a minute after reviewing it, it’s unlikely to come at all.
Therefore, your time spent on a question that seems to be taking up a lot of mental energy, but creating no progress, is not worth it.
Instead, what can be a lot more useful, is to spend some time double-checking questions in which you’re confident you already know the answer.
Why Review What You Know?
At Professional Exam Tutoring , we’ve heard feedback from students that indicate they can get through a lot more questions, and fine errors on their exam, when reviewing questions for which they were already highly confidence in their answer.
The reasons to review questions you thought you got right is twofold:
- It gives you a chance to double check your answers, and make sure you did calculations correct, or referenced the right definition.
- It also makes it much more likely that you can get yourself another free point, because you are more likely to understand these types of questions. Hence, you are more likely to catch a mistake if you made one.
On most exams, students tend to have at least one or two mistakes on a set of questions for which they are confident.
For instance, the 75 questions (excluding the experimental) on the SIE Exam, may lead to about 50 or 60 questions where student is confident if they’ve studied a lot. However, even if they’re confident on 50 or 60 questions, there’s a very high probability that two or three of those questions are wrong. A quick double check with time left at the end can change a fail to a pass.
With 20 or 30 minutes left on the exam after you’ve finished answering every question, you may be able to review up to 40 or so questions and catch a mistake.
Overall, we recommend that you do not leave the exam with any time left on it. An extra point or two can make all the difference. If you need any help, contact us here. Good luck!